It's April 7th...

Yesterday was an interesting day of sorts at work.   It seemed like every class I taught had a little surprise....

First off was my early afternoon intermediate level class.  Normally there are two men and two women in the class but one of the ladies has gone AWOL after heading down to Tokyo for a little trip back in mid March.  Of the two fellows, one joined the class officially this week.  I had chatted him up a bit the previous week during the warm-up stage of the lesson and found out he was working on getting his teaching license.  Currently he's teaching at a private cram school.  This week I found out a bit more about his academic career.

If I recall correctly he had originally been enrolled in a private university down in Chiba.  He went abroad to England on a ten month stint as an exchange student.  While he was abroad he became a bit homesick and proceeded to search for all manner of things Japanese on the Internet.  A certain subject caught his fancy and when he returned to Japan he transferred to a different university to obtain his bachelor's degree with a major in that subject.  The subject in question being Buddhist statuary from the late Heian period to the end of the Muromachi period.  Needless to say that isn't a major which will open doors to opportunities in the corporate world so he now finds himself in my English class.

The following class was a beginner's class.  All the students are adults and four out of the five are retirees.  The newest student who joined about a month ago is a quite spoken lady in her sixties.  A few weeks ago she mentioned in a rather straight forward manner that she's a Christian.  So this week during the warm-up portion of the lesson she read through her prepared text and mentioned that it had been Easter this past weekend.  I chuckled a bit to myself when I heard that.  Last year I had been caught unawares when I had gone down to the Canadian embassy only to find it was closed on account of Easter Monday (whilst my American co-worker was able to conduct his business successfully at the US embassy).  Anyways, this student presented the rest of us with a container full of Easter eggs and some German style cookies (the name of them which escapes me - they're the variety with nuts in them and they're rolled in powdered sugar - a late Austrian friend of my mother baked them in crescent shapes).  Needless to say this was a most pleasant surprise!  On closer inspection afterwards I found that the eggs had been decorated in a peculiarly Japanese fashion - their artwork was printed on plastic sleeves which could be removed in the same fashion as the plastic sleeve labels can be removed from commercially sold PET drink bottles.  Somehow or another they had been made to fit the eggs exactly.  My guess is that the plastic sleeves were made to shrink and fit the eggs snuggly by placing the hard boiled eggs in them them when the eggs were still hot.

The last class with an element surprise in it was an evening class taught at a client's site.  The first student to arrive was tardy and he apologized for being late.  Then he went on to say "It's April 7th...do you know what today is?".  I was completely stumped.  "It's the day the Yamato was sunk", he carried on.  "Ah...I see", I said to myself.  I had been tipped off by my predecessor about this fellow.  He had mentioned the student's somewhat right leaning attitudes.  So his little piece of trivia wasn't a total surprise.  Yet it was in spite of my interest in the conflict which included the sinking of the Yamato.  The irony in my case is that I've read a couple of books about the ship's last mission but I'd never taken it upon myself to remember what day it had been sunk.  I can remember details such as the struggles of the men in the water after the ship sank or the role of the Japanese-American crew member but not the day.  Nonetheless, I followed his comments with a brief discussion on technical details of the ship.  That's a relatively neutral topic and it served well to avoid going down the rabbit hole of nationalistic feelings attached to the ship.

I didn't get caught off guard in my last class of the day so more or less it was business as usual there.  I say "More or less" as I was able to catch my student off guard when I gave her the last remaining Easter egg....