Eto ne...

When making a speech in English, professional speech coaches tell their clients, "don't say 'um'". And they are right. It fills audio space, but it's a horrible little syllable made up of two the most banal letters in the alphabet. "Um" is a little groan, produced by the vocal chords in stressful situations when the brain is still loading.

In Japanese, the common place-holder is "eto, ne" which takes up two more syllables than does "um" and includes the middle syllable "toe" which acts as a pivot around the melodious "eh" bookends. I vote we adopt it in place of "um".

In Tosa-ben, the regional dialect of Kochi Prefecture, they have another syllable which is also frequently used by everyone and seems to be rather favored by my students, particularly my 6th graders who are just on the edge of adult conversations rather than kid dialogues: "sa". "Sa" (pronounced "saaaaaaaaaaah" or "saaah", but hardly ever "sah") fills the air during school lunch and break times when students embark on meaningful conversations about schoolwork, the kid with food allergies, or annoying classmates.

There are a variety of other conversation fillers you can use if you're not hyaku percent sure what is being discussed. Their effective utilization is dependent on your vocal inflection, but even if you are only giri-giri and non-committal on tone, you can generally get away with not understanding everything and sounding like you are following part of the conversation. A few of the most useful of these are:

"Hounto ni" - really? Really? For real? Are you sure? Wow. I can't believe it. I see.

"Sou desu ne" - That's about the size of it. Hmm, you're right. I should have thought about that myself... I see.

"Sou desu ka?" - Really? I. Never. Knew. How about that? Is that right? Whoa. Shut the front door. I see.

"Naruhodo" - I see. I see. I see. I see. I see.

(When you read an English textbook from a Japanese school, you might often find "I see" in sample English dialogues. The teacher will then ask me if this is "natural English" and when I reply that I rarely use that phrase and it sounds translated, she assumes this is because I don't really understand English and don't have much call to use it at home. Sometimes it seems like Japanese people think English speakers get by with body language and grunting...)


So if you happen to find yourself walking through the rice paddies and an obaachan stops to fill you in on the weather, just throw out a few of those useful nuggets of colloquial chat. Even if you have no idea what she's talking about. It will impress her no end.

And if you can't remember those, just go back to "um".

Here's the Thing

But not the pictures.

It recently occurred to me that I can blog without posting pictures. This makes for a much less colorful post with many fewer opportunities for visual humor, but I can still fill you in on the extremely important minutiae of my everyday life here in the middle of nowhere (hereafter referred to as "inaka"). Brace yourselves, it's shockingly dull.

In spite of our lack of nightclubs, bars, brothels, and shopping malls, my life here is surprisingly unpredictable. This is mostly due to the extremely changeable weather in Kochi prefecture, and especially on the east side of the ken, where the mountains march right up to the shoreline and the Muroto peninsula mutates the sky and air around us to a frightful degree. You can be going through your whole morning thinking what a lovely day it's going to be and by lunchtime you are swimming your way back to the apartment through a never-ending stream of grey rain. A typhoon might happen at any moment. And that predicted typhoon, the one you've been carefully following on its way up from Okinawa, might skip you completely and dash on to hammer Korea while you carefully put your poncho back in your locker and pretend you didn't bring it with you to school.

Forget about doing your hair. You can't win. If the rain-forest-ish humidity of the weekend didn't murder it, the desert-aridity of the following week will.  Think you dressed wisely, preparing for a cool day of moderate rainfall? Think again - today's forecast is overcast with a dash of spontaneous face-melting-30-degrees-celsius breezes. And you were totally psyched about practicing for sports day? Good luck. The field, which was parched and bone-dry two minutes ago is now a sunken muddy paste.

This year, the elementary school (shougakkou) and the junior high (chugakkou) [spell-check keeps red-under-lining those words and I keep thinking, "I'm pretty sure I'm spelling them right". Then I remember, those aren't English] combined their sports days this year, mainly because the JR High has only 48 students this year, and let's face it, no one was going to show up to watch. Putting the two schools together means we have now a complement of almost 200 students, 40 teachers, and various moms-and-pops running around the field at any given moment.

The weather here is so unreliable that this past week a little schedule found its way to my desk:

Official Sports Day is Sunday (9/23)
Practice on Thursday, all day, class on Friday, practice on Saturday (if rain, substitute class)
In case of rain on Thursday: practice on Friday, class on Saturday, Sports Day Sunday
In case of rain on Friday: class on Friday,  class on Saturday, Sports Day Sunday
In case of rain on Saturday: class on Saturday, no class on Sunday, Sports Day Monday, vacation day-in-lieu of Saturday on Tuesday
In case of rain on Sunday: class on Monday (or practice if weather permits), Sports Day on Tuesday, vacation in-lieu of weekend on Wednesday
In case of rain on Tuesday: class on Tuesday, Sports Day practice on Wednesday, Sports Day on Thursday, no class on Friday
In case of rain on Thursday: move Sports day to Friday (9/28)
If rain on Friday: cancel Sports Day

We went to practice on Thursday and everything was just grand. The weather was beautiful (it is unseasonably cool for late September, especially following our very mild early summer, by which everyone predicted a long and hot summer, extending into November), practice went off without a hitch, and I pretended to be a sixth-grader and ran a portion of the relay race to the great delight and astonishment of my students, but unfortunately to no great success for our team. In our defense, we started off with the midget first-grader and our second-to-last was the anorexic-ish-ly-skinny Jr Higher who hasn't enough muscles in his whole body to move his legs quickly enough to get him around the track at reasonably speed.

Saturday was beautiful and according to the schedule, I went to practice on the school ground at the Jr High. To my surprise, I discovered no one was there, so I wandered over to the elementary school to play with kids for the rest of the day and collect my bento lunch. I only really clearly understand one transaction every day, and that is the lunch service. When I asked people to clarify the schedule for me "You mean, we don't have class on Saturday, just practice, would I like to order a bento box?" they must have really meant, "We don't have practice on Saturday, just class, would you like to order a bento box?"

I never make mistakes about the bento box.

Saturday was fun, but it rained Saturday night. In this event, we found an entirely new set of subsitute instructions waiting for us:

In case of rain on Sunday: class on Sunday, vacation day-in-lieu of Saturday on Monday, Sports Day on Tuesday, vacation day-in-lieu of Sunday on Wednesday, class on Thursday and Friday.

Since Japanese teachers don't like to use email, I have no idea how they got the word out to teachers who come from almost every corner of the prefecture. I had to ask the librarian to make sure to text me whenever she got word of what was going on.

So the long and the short of it is, we still haven't had sports day and I took Monday off, damn it. Vacation in-lieu of comprehension.