How not to scar your children for life

“Let me out!”

My daughter was crying in the planetarium. The show hadn’t started yet, but she was already crying. My son hadn’t made it this far.

Their fear of the cinemas all started with a visit to the New Zealand Farm, a Kiwi theme park in Hiroshima. There they had a 3D dinosaur show, something which I had foolishly thought would be an instant hit with my son. He loves reading his dinosaur books. He also likes watching videos about them.

When my son dawned the 3D spectacles he completely freaked out. Not only did he darkness scare him but the dinosaurs popping out at him had been the clincher. We left the theatre not long after we had entered it.

Since then my son refuses to go into any movie theatres even if they were showing his favourite action heroes. All we can do is wait for the DVD release. I don’t know when he will snap out of this fear. I just hope we haven’t scarred him for life.

My first piece of advice is this: when you think something may be fun for your little ones, think twice before doing it. Because it could be the start of a phobia that needn’t have been one.

And my other piece of advice is perhaps shows like these aren’t such a good idea after all. New Zealand Farm closed down not long after that trip.

Three years since my last sake matsuri

I went to the Saijo Sake Festival yesterday.

This time is it with my children. My youngest, being two year old, had not been born on my last trip three years ago. Certainly different when you become a parent and your kids get bigger. Both can play games now. Our son played the shooting gallery and our daughter the dice game.

My son won a toy gun. It shoots beads. This is something I am not too keen on. But it does teach him about how dangerous guns can be even if it is a toy gun. I tested it by shooting a piece of paper. It went clean through. I can just imagine how much my son would cry if he was hit by a shot. This morning I accidentally hit him with a toy plastic baseball. He was already rubbing his arm in slight pain. And it wasn’t even a fast pitch.

Coming back to the Sake Festival, I am not too keen on it these days as I don’t drink. There was nothing good in it. drunk people, greasy food, kids dancing pretending to be adults, toys of bad influence. Not a single thing I can think of which is good about it except for the business of sake. Not at all comforting.

Chicken pox … among other things

My daughter has the chicken pox. She got it from her brother. He had it two weeks ago. And today is my day to look after her. It means I have time to blog, even if it is just to say I haven’t the time to.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been following the news. I read the IPCC report. And also see that Australia is about to sign onto the Kyoto Protocol. China also has been making the news with their proposal for industrialized countries to reduce CO2. But say so and acting so are two different things. China’s headlong rush to industrialization is damaging to the environment to say the least. Yet neither are they showing self-restraint, nor is anyone stopping them or think modernization is a bad idea.

I wish someone would.

I read Electric Universe by David Bodanis this week mainly to find out more about the impact of electricity on life on our planet. I read it while keeping in mind the damage production and use of electricity can cause. While I now have a better understand of the subject again I still have a problem with our inability to show self-restraint.

I also the documentary The Dodo’s Guide to Surviving Extinction. According to the program the number one rule for survival is avoid human beings. I thought that was funny, cynical and true all at once.

So I must end it here. I must attend to my neglected sick daughter who is running around the house tearing up our Japanese paper doors. The destructive force of one unsupervised child is something that still amazes me. How the Japanese have coped with this cultural furnishing with children for so long, I don’t know.

I haven’t proofread this, so forgive me.

Growing fuel?

Question: What do Dolly Parton and I have in common?

Absolutely nothing.

I thought I’d put this in just to start my post on why I am not posting much these days. I am as flat-chested as a man can be, I don’t speak with a Southern twang and I work from five to nine instead. Well, not exactly work work, but something akin to it. Having two children under three certainly takes a lot of effort and time. As a write from my PC in our bedroom my daughter is crying because the keyboard taps are disturbing her sleep. The placement of the computer in the house is something that cannot be helped as we only have two rooms in our house (the other is the kitchen-dining-living room).

So for those wondering why I blog so little – the answer is here.

This plus the fact that I barely have time to get online (or read the daily delivered newspaper) these days writing a thesis and all. And teaching English at night three times a week doesn’t help my “blog cause” either. Not that I need the work but I started classes in my little town a year ago and now they need me to continue, especially my high school students.

So to my few regular readers – please forgive me.

What I have found then is that blogging isn’t for parents with kids or people with lots to do (that’s me and me again). Life is more than blogging. But that is not to say blogging is a useless pursuit. Far from it. It has helped my writing tremendously and has let me meet people with similar interests, ideas and thoughts which I would not have found if not for the internet. I am glad to have met these people and have the opportunity to share my thoughts with them as well as read about theirs.

Enough (again) about blogging.

This article caught my eye: Finally someone from the UN has openly condemned biofuel. Actually I think many people do but they go unreported. I, for one, have complained about this issue. As an ordinary concerned citizen I will not be heard. As I have always said you do not need to be a math genius to see that using crops to fuel the millions of cars on the planet’s roads means a lot will need to be grown. This will mean a lot of land now used for growing food will instead need to be used for growing fuel. That’s pretty irresponsible since we have not rid planet of hunger. The sad thing is, of course, hunger could be solved today if we only distribute this food more equitably. But that is not about to happen, is it. Our selfish ways simply will not allow this.

And if we do try to have our “growing fuel” cake and literally eat it too we will need more land to do this. And of course we all know about the problem of deforestation.

No, the only way we will solve this problem is (a substantial) reduction of our current rate of consumption – less driving, less cars to drive, more even distribution of food. No math was involved in this conclusion, but only an image in my head of what it takes to feed six billion people and fuel millions (if not billions) of cars at the same time.

Sports Day… Japanese style

There are two things which are very different about Sports Days back in Australia and here in Japan.

Firstly, not much sport goes on Sports Days in Japan. Sure they run around and stuff but it isn’t sport. In my Australian school days we would do the usual track and field – 100m, hurdles, high jump, even shot put. But here they just do mini-versions of short-distance running and play various games… even at junior high-school level. Rather childish.

Secondly, parents go watch their kids on Sports Days here. They also participate somewhat. Back “home” neither would be done. At my kids Sports Day last weekend I had to run a relay with the other fathers. Just my luck that I had to be pitted against a teacher friend of mine, a fit soccer-playing mad guy. I took it easy for the first corner until I realized he was coming up fast. Didn’t want to look the idiot-father that I am so I put legs into fifth gear (something I hadn’t done in at least ten years) to get to my relay partner ahead of him. After that we had a good-ol’ chat.

The point I am trying to make is that Sports Days are not really for sport – they are social events. Who cares how the kids go (well we do a little) but mostly it is about how getting together and working together.

In a society like Japan where the group takes precedent over everything else this makes sense. But to the outsider, the uninitiated, this can be quite stressful. Not being used to say ‘no’ to these things is so unnatural to the Western mind-set. But like some line from a movie benefit for the many outweighs the benefit for the few.

If anything the Japanese are truly socialist without know it.

A week in the life of wo-chan

Just like that and another week has gone by.

The start of the week saw a new prime minister elected in Japan after the previous PM quit unexpectedly. Yasuo Fukuda is the new Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leader and effectively the new Prime Minister. Since the end of the War the LDP have been out Office once briefly. The Japanese are rather conservative in their political selection this way.

He made some good pledges including:

• not visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine which enshrines the war-dead including war-criminals
• improving relations with its regional neighbours
• giving more emphasis to the population in the countryside in terms of federal spending
• reducing the burden of expenses to the elderly for medical costs.

But whether these and other pledges will be kept remain to be seen.

And on Tuesday I joined a vegetable growing class. There is a vegetable patch right smack bang in the middle of the campus. I discovered they had a non-credit class on hands-on experience on growing your own vegetables. Even though we have our own vegetable patch at home where my in-laws grow lots of food and I have my own little corner where I am growing carrots right now I chose to join the class to get more guidance from the more experienced. And besides during daylight I am literally not at home so tending the home patch has been difficult.

On Wednesday I spent the day at home looking after my daughter. She is one years old and has just started to walk. So now she is quite a handful. She is also talking a lot more but still what she says is incoherent. I discovered she can understand a lot though. Her vocabulary is much bigger than I had expected or believed.

And my son too has grown. He had his Sports Day this weekend which all parents attend (and participate in) in Japan. I had to run around a tiny track with other fathers. The cornering is more difficult than you would think. But my son compared to last year was much more controlled. He can actually sit still for more than several minutes. Truly amazing considering he is really active. I caught up with several teacher-friends of mine. They are all working hard as usual getting home at eight-thirty or later. In Japan this is common for teachers and is unthinkable back in Australia. For me the children are more important. But in saying so I myself work at night three nights a week teaching so I am guilty too of neglecting my parenthood duties. It is a work ethic philosophy here in Japan. Hard work is a sign of being Japanese. Blah! A ridiculous notion if you ask me.

Among other things we went on our monthly spring water collection. Once a month we go to bring home 80 litres of spring water for drinking and cooking. Although we have both clean tap and mountain water at home my wife still insists on the best for us kids and us. I don’t mind and its a nice trip out of the house.

We also went shopping. My wife needed clothes and I decided I too would get something for autumn. I bought a long-sleeve shirt and a wallet. After eleven years my old wallet was in tatters. I think I had gotten ample use from it and deserve a new one. Hopefully this one will last a decade or more also.

Enough about me and back to the world. This week saw Mr George W Bush go back on non-binding promises he made for his country. What did I say earlier? You cannot trust those who make half-hearted agreements. As usual the world’s greatest contributor to greenhouse gases fuelling global warming and climate change has reneged on its responsibility. I am not surprised, of course.

Intense

I have just finished an intensive course on Environmental Education. It had been a good four days. The teacher is a former student of the graduate school and I think is now doing NPO work nearby. Her class gave me many good ideas about how and what to teach about the environment. And I learned a lot from her about the history and current state of environmentalism. Thank you, Sensei.

Other than that I have been doing my fatherhood bit at night in between teaching. I have decided to use my English class as a second testing ground for my theory on vocabulary retention. I will be using Harry Potter. I know, I know, people will say Harry isn’t real literature but that would be missing the point of English language teaching.

In my opinion there is no better work to read to learn English than Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (HPPS). According to my research Harry is just under 80,000 words long and has over 5,600 unique word types. This means it has relatively few words for its length making for a high rate of repetition (a key ingredient in learning vocabulary). But enough about academia.

My daughter started to walk recently. As of this morning she can trundle around without falling over. She has that raised-hands-for-balance style of walking right now. And my son is using fishing-for-agreement structures in his language. He is gaining more and more social skills as shown by his interaction with other children.

And my wife is now used to the work routine. We balance things by tight scheduling so that the kids get food before irritation sets in. Then I can go to teach in the evenings. Like clockwork… until it breaks down.

But if you see me blogging too much you know I am not being a good father, fine husband and an earnest student.

Busy, busy, busy

So I have been busy with part of my thesis of late. I have been trying to create a list of vocabulary for use in one of my professor’s classes which hopefully will yield some data for my research. So far it has been going well. In case you have been wondering my area of enquiry is applied linguistics with a corpus slant to it. More specifically I am a stylistics man, on how the use of literature in English language teaching.

I also had three days of conferences last week. I had learned quite a bit from those three days which will help when I give my paper in a few months time. I am nervous about it as I haven’t given a paper in language education before.

Other than that I have been busy with the kids. The youngest is walking now so we must vigilantly watch her. Things once out of reach are now targets for potential disaster. Cleaning up the food off the ground isn’t our idea of fun. My son is getting more conscious of his place in the family structure of things. The boss is still us but he now understands it and is going through a period of adjustment. And with my wife is back at work after maternity leave so it means I have to go home from university earlier than I would like to prepare dinner and so on. Sigh.

Ancestral return

I went into university today. It had seemed everyone took the day off because tomorrow is the start of the three days of the Ancestral return worship or Obon. According to my mother-in-law tomorrow we will go “pick up” the ancestors from the graves and bring them home where they will spend the night with us. Then we will “take them back” to the graves, bid farewell and until next year when we do the same thing. That’s the routine. I told my mother about this Japanese custom over the phone tonight and she just about freaked out (we’re Chinese).

Anyway, I was the only one in my research lab in today. I had lunch with an American friend who happens to like books, not just any books but Japanese literature also. We had a nice chat over a nice lunch (too extravagant for a income-less student/parent like myself, according to my wife).

I did some more work on Harry Potter – research – before heading home, fighting the Ancestral return traffic. When I got home my son was playing with the neighbour’s nieces back from the big city.

I had also hired four DVDs for the holidays – Lilo and Stitch, The Incredibles, Mr and Mrs Smith, and Nobody Knows (Dare mo Shiranai). The first two should keep the kids happy over the next few days while my wife and I can sit back a little… just a little.

Work and study – the craziness – starts again this Friday.

Pets, culture and fatherhood

So I went to the local festival tonight. My wife and I thought it would be nice to get the kids out of the house after a quiet day at home.

What I didn’t expect was that we would come home soon after with a new pet – a newt. I had not known what a newt was until tonight. We don’t have them in Australia. Personally I hate pets. The idea of my enjoyment at the expense of another animal’s life just doesn’t appeal to me. Just thinking about what jail is like makes me feel sorry for the animals.

In Japan they have this thing called rather paradoxically kingyo sukui or “goldfish saving”. The object is to use a paper “net” to scoop goldfish into a bucket. But the paper pretty much disintegrates in the process so you cannot catch too many. In this particular booth at the festival (all festivals have them) the guy gives them to you. So for our 200 yen (silly us paid for mine and my sons at 100 yen a piece) we got a newt and five sickly guppies.