Day Nine, or “My new Home”

Today’s the day we split up from a group of 200 FMFers to our smaller city groups of 20. During this week we are scheduled to check out a number of educational items – PTA, University, elementary, lower secondary (i.e., junior high), and upper secondary (i.e., high school). We also stay with our host family for about a day and a half to immerse ourselves in Japanese culture. After this week we’ll head back to Tokyo. But before all this happens, we started our day by heading out to our host city.

Our host city will be Isehara, a city of about 100,000 in the Kanaga prefecture (i.e., state) about an hour and a half west of Tokyo.

Once we got there, we noticed that it wasn’t nearly as big as Tokyo (not a big surprise when Tokyo has about 12,000,000). Here’s a look at some of their homes:

After lunch (spaghetti with squid) and checking out the wine tree,

we took part in a traditional tea ceremony. The tea ceremony is a very traditional ritual involving precise actions by both the server and the served. First you wash up:

Then you kneel down and eat some treats – they’re supposed to offer a good contrast to the bitterness of the green tea.

Then the server brings a cup of tea and you bow towards each other. You have to turn it clockwise twice to avoid drinking from the nice side of the cup. Then you drink up. I have to admit, I wasn’t a big fan of the green tea (tasted kind of fishy?), but the ceremony was interesting. Anyway, after you’re done drinking, you turn the cup counter-clockwise twice, put the cup down, and bow when the server takes it away. We did the ceremony twice to get it right. Here are the folks who helped us and my super tea-drinking group:

Notice that I am the only male among my group. For some reason, out of 200 people, only 20 were male, and in my group of 20, there were only three males. I’m not sure what this says about education or who applies for these things or my effeminate nature, but this seemed a bit odd. Hmmm….

We then went on to meet some PTA members from the different school districts in Isehara. The discussion went on for about two hours, and we discussed topics that affect both of our systems of education. The issues we discussed were things like how the low-birth rate affects education, the examination system, the voluntary/mandatory nature of Japanese PTA’s, and security in the schools. Here are the PTA members we talked to:

Here’s me asking a thoughtful question:

Okay, so it wasn’t a real-time photo, but I’m sure that’s what I did look like when I asked my thoughtful question.

We then headed to our hotel, not in Isehara, but in the neighboring city Atsugi. Ishisan told us that Isehara didn’t have hotels that met FMF’s size requirements for Americans. Apparently the hotels must be a certain size to fit us, so we had to move on to Atsugi.

When we got to Atsugi and checked in to the hotel, Ishisan showed us around town and helped us find where the restaurants were located. While walking around, we noticed that Atsugi was quite a bit different than Tokyo. If Tokyo is the pretty city with the pretty people in the pretty clothes, Atsugi is a little bit different. It wasn’t as clean, it wasn’t as quiet, and the people were much less formal – lots of jeans, t-shirts, hats, and different hairstyles.

That was interesting, but we were hungry, so we had to move on. We ended up eating at another conveyor belt sushi place (where I bravely avoided any and all octopus as well as the squid plate that was on the belt for 45 minutes and must have passed me 20 times). After that it was ironing time – I am a domestic machine!