Family Day? Not in Japan

One of the problems with maintaining a blog about child raising is that the child-raising itself takes so much time that thee is little time to blog about it. If I thought I had little to,e last year while on child care leave, I have even less time this year now that I’m back to full time work teaching.

Being a teacher in Japan leaves even less time, since the time demands include evenings and weekends. My current school requires me to be in charge of at least one sports-related club and my committee work requires me to sacrifice entire weekends from time to time. My school additionally has various entrance exams during the year — five of them in total — which require me to give up holidays. There are also Open Campus days, School “Experience” days, Entrance Explanation days, and other administrative-oriented events…most of which take place on the weekend so that parents and prospective students can attend.

So, when I was recently asked to work a second weekend in a row, to chaperone students to a speech contest, I requested that another English teacher take charge, arguing that I hadn’t seen my daughter in almost 8 days.

My request rankled a few feathers.

Year Two: Nursery School

"Nyuenshiki" (entrance ceremony). The sign reads "omedeto" (congratulations).

Starting April 1st this year (the beginning of the school year in Japan), I went back to work and my daughter started her first year at a nearby private nursery school. Even prior to the official first day, we attended an “entrance ceremony” (nyuen-shiki) complete with teacher and administrator introductions (a bit too long for most 2 and 3 year olds) and a couple of songs for the kids. Followed by a photo session. We later paid a few dollars for nice photographs taken by the nursery school’s contracted photographer, both posed and random shots during the ceremony.

To be honest, I was totally confused by the Japanese nursery school system and left most of the paperwork up to my wife.

Year 2: Colleague Reactions

Just over 5 months ago, my year-long child care leave ended and I went back to work. Since then, I haven’t posted on this blog for a very good reason: I was insanely busy.

Of course, not too busy to continue to take care of my daughter. I hope that goes without saying now.

Endings and beginnings

I go back to work tomorrow on April 1st. My year-long paternity leave is over. No April Fools.

Don’t panic: Japan is not sinking

My last post, about something now that seems totally innocuous, was on Friday, March 11th, at 10 or 11 in the morning. Japan time.

We all know what happened just a few hours later.

‘Tis the Season…al Flu

These past few weeks have reminded me of an old Catholic joke.

St. Peter’s at the Pearly Gates, and he’s checking his list of the recently departed when a new soul suddenly arrives without warning. St. Peter glances down at the list, doesn’t see any new names, then glares at the newcomer.

“How’d you get here so quickly?” he demands.

“Flu.”

Not that anybody in my family has been that sick lately, but we did experience a little merry-go-round of early spring colds the last couple weeks of February. Fortunately none of us got the flu, though, maybe because of the flu shots we all got.

Toddler Artistry

One of my daughter’s favorite pastimes is o-egaki (picture drawing). Even before she could walk, she was scribbling with crayons…the washable kind, a set of 12 colors that my wife and I got for her at around her birthday last May.

We quickly learned the sagacity of covering most of the living room floor with old newspapers as the little artist created her various masterpieces on the back of discarded printer paper (urakami). Unfortunately, newspaper doesn’t stick quite as well to the walls, or to the chairs, or the table, or the bookcases, or…