shitsubou

I've tried not to be too negative about certain things here. I've tried really hard to ignore the bad and savor the good but I'm going to vent a bit. All of my problems are connected to the fact that my Japanese still sucks a lot. I came here with expectations to become fluent in a few months and have to dig really deep to find challenging Japanese like newspapers or something. That is not even close to what happened. My Japanese did increase for a bit but then it just sort of stagnated around the end of the year. So here I am almost ready to go home and while I have read manga cover to cover with out a dictionary (although didn't get all of it) and I can run earns like getting my camera fixed or shipping internationally, I still have the hardest time in the world understanding my host family. Its not just at home either, I've realized that I am the worst student in the class. I can usually see peoples grades when our teacher hands them out and Im always in the bottom. I took the Jtest with Patrick and he passed but I failed. This monday we had a speech test and I know I got the lowest grade. Im going to complain a little to the nice teacher about the speech contest because me and one other person actually gave a speech, everyone else just read it off a paper. So yeah mine was didn't have as complex grammar in it because I just wrote my main points in English on a scrap paper and sort of made it up on the spot. I didn't really "make it up on the spot" I mean I practiced it a lot and each time I would practice it it would come out a little different. But one of my friends literally copied a line from Haruhi (anime) and read it off in front of everyone.

So yeah all of this work and I see everyone doing better then me and I just feel so freaking stupid sometimes. Like Japanese is my tokui, or pride, like its what makes me special and being here in a program where not only is it everyone's tokui as well but they are all improving way beyond me. Its frustrating. I think I really have hit a wall here, I need to go home, take a break from studying Japanese then come back at it with a new resolve because despite all of the stuff I want to do with better Japanese I still find myself just doing the bare minimum in the classes here. Like I have a really hard time saying that any of the classes in this program are "good". Some teachers, wont say names because they read our blogs apparently, have no focus or direction in the class and it just goes off into all sorts of tangents. While Im sure the teacher thinks this is great and exploring people's minds it just leaves students confused on what they are supposed to do in the class and how they are even supposed to get a grade. Some classes are way too relaxed and nothing gets done, some are completely useless, some just aren't good classes. The thing they all have in common is that they all encourage students to not try, do the bare minimum, and not care about the subject at all.

You know I still dont like my host family. I really don't get it. You would think that I would have goten used to them by now but I haven't. I still don't feel comfortable in this house. The other day at dinner she said that there was a school to teach the kansai dialect to ryugakusei (foreign exchange) and I was trying to get at that I think its stupid to study kansai dialect because Japanese people expect you to not know Japanese to begin with so why waist the effort to learn something that you dont have to use. Plus the idea of learning kansai ben is to make you seem like a native Osaka person, but no matter what you ever do you will ALWAYS be just a gaijin, foreigner.

To go off on a little tangent, Japan is actually really racist. Everyone has this nice clean idea of Japan but its all just lies. Japanese people are really racists to particularly Koreans. Its a lot like blacks in America. People were brought into the country against their will, forced to work here, became free but generation after generation finds it self stuck in a lower economic class, and they are blamed for crime. There are also the aborigine people of Japan called the Ainu and for hundreds of years the Japanese government has forcefully tried to destroy their culture. They are also often discriminated against. Also on the south most part of Japan is an island called Okinawa, this is a lot like Hawaii in the sense that it was its own nation but was conquered because of its strategical position. The okinawins and the ainu are fighting desperately to preserve their language and culture but only recently have they been recognized by the government as a minority group.

I didn't know it but there are around a million Japanese descendants living in Brazil. Around 1900 in the Meji restoration the economy wasn't doing so well so Japan made a deal with Brazil that Japanese workers could immigrate to Brazil to work. Like immigration stories in the US (especially Chinese who built the rail road tracks in the west), the situation was not what they were told it was, they couldn't afford to go back home and ended up living their for generations. In the early 90s or late 80s Japan was enjoying economic success so their was a need for low level labors. A lot of the labors who came in illegally were from Iran. The Japanese people didn't seem to like the Iranians but needed the workers so they extended citizenship to all people who are Japanese up to the 3rd generation. This way they could have the workers from Brazil come and work while maintaining their xenophobic idea of a harmonious society.

What gets me personally is the stereotypes of Westerns. Our teacher showed us a TV show episode, as language practice, called Cool Japan. What this show is is foreigners going around being silly, experiencing Japanese things for the first time, and talking about how great Japan is. Japan's view of Westerners is movie stars and the silly ones they see on TV. I don't know I just felt really upset by seeing that show for some reason. I hate that I'll never fit in this society. I hate it when a store clerk uses English with me. I really hate the thought that people might be glancing looks at me just because I'm white. I think I understand in a tiny, tiny bit now what it might be like to be a minority in America.

Well there you go todays post is just some complaining I guess but I wanted to get it off my chest.