British Culture and Society Quick Questions

I teach a course called British Culture and Society. The final exam begins with 20 quick questions. These give me an idea how much of the course the students have retained. Students can refer to the weekly handouts of my PowerPoint presentations so they simply have to find the right slide to know the correct answer. Nevertheless, here are some of the students' wrong answers.

NAME THE FOUR COUNTRIES IN THE UNITED KINGDOM?

Wales, Scotland, London, Northern Ireland

WHO WROTE THE SONG 'AULD LANG SYNE'?

Richard Branson
Arthur Conan Doyle
The EIGHTES
Oasis

WHO IS THE PRIME MINISTER?

James Brown
Morris Dancer

WHO WROTE THE SHERLOCK HOLMES' STORIES?

Agatha qulisty
Agatha Christie
Connan Doile
Konan Dyle
Conan Doil

WHO INTRODUCED CHRISTIANITY TO BRITAIN?

Christians (no, he didn't get a point for being a smart arse)
Saint Patrick
Agath christie
Anglo-Saxons
King Henry VII
Charles the first
Agatha Christie
Patrick
Maurice

WHICH EXPENSIVE BUT POPULAR FOOD ITEM WAS GROWN IN THE WEST INDIES?

Laverbread
Eggs or milk
Cheese
Fish and Chips

WHAT LANGUAGE DID WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR BRING TO ENGLAND IN 1066?

Viking words
Viking words: old Norse
English
Anglo-Saxon language
Latin
He brought the language of the ruling classes.

DOES THE UNITED KINGDOM HAVE THE DEATH PENALTY?

No,he doesn't.

HOW MANY WIVES DID HENRY VIII have?

One.
two
5 wives
8
He had 9 wives.
twelve
seven
He had 7 wives.
12
9

(From last year's paper) WHAT EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE ON 29TH APRIL 2011?

It is Showa Emperor's birthday. (This is technically true although the Showa Emperor died in 1989. And he wasn't British.)

Some short answer questions tomorrow.

The Four Seasons Hotel at Chinzan-so, Tokyo

Most Japanese universities run orientation weekends for their new students. Such weekends are supposed to help students to bond with each other and to foster group loyalties: to the school, the faculty, the seminar teacher. I've been on a fair few of these, mostly to Nazi-run mountain retreats where I have enjoyed hiking the trails while my seminar students dawdle behind me moaning about how it's too far and too hilly and too 'outside'. And the panic that sets in when they can't get a phone signal ...

Last year, however, the first-year retreat was cancelled because our university's orientation venue is a Hawaiian resort in ... Fukushima. At that time, you had to get official permission to enter any of the disaster zones and you needed special government-issued chitties to be able to buy petrol there. So that trip was obviously out of the question. Instead, on Monday, all first-year students were treated to a table manners lesson and lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel, Chinzan-so.

Each teacher was seated at a table with a group of students, presumably to encourage conversation although I found it had the opposite effect, especially as I don't teach first-years and didn't know any of them. The students were extremely intimidated by the opulence of the ballroom and the rows of silver cutlery and tended to speak to their friends in hushed whispers, or else they sat in cowed silence. The table manners teacher, a manager from the Four Seasons I think, taught us that we should make light conversation and I did my best in both languages but by the soup course I was exhausted from having to hold a conversation largely with myself. So I suggested that we photograph our food (see above). Japanese young people are not the best conversationalists, especially since many Japanese are told that it is rude to speak at meal times or in the presence of someone of higher rank. Hence, I had to make all the conversation.

We started with seafood 'audible', it said in katakana which I assumed was French until on the train home I was reading the table manners booklet we had been given and discovered that it was Japanese for 'Hors d'Oeuvres.' Then there was soup, a fish course and a meat course with a grapefruit sherbet in between to cleanse the palate, then coconut and pineapple parfait with cocktail fruits, and a macaroon with the university's name and logo on it.

Watching the students pick up each item of cutlery was like the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the ape wields the bone. And they had no idea what to do with the fish knives. I demonstrated although I have to say that I can't use a fish knife because I am left-handed and I have never come across a left-handed fish knife. At this point I think we would all have liked to have been given chopsticks. It is actually easier to eat fish with chopsticks.

The student next to me jumped when the waiter leaned in to offer bread rolls. There was a whispered discussion then one student asked me when they were supposed to eat the rolls. And their faces when, having got one roll out of the way, the waiter leaned in and put another one on their plates! The same thing happened when they finished their fruit juices. I told them they could just leave what they didn't want. "You mean it is OK to waste food?" They asked. I explained the idea of leaving a little on your plate to show that you had eaten enough but they weren't keen on the idea, even though several of the women at my table did not particularly like the food. One hated seafood. "But you are Japanese", I said. "How can you survive?" But looking at her I thought it was touch and go. Japan is the only first-world country where the birth weight of babies and of women is actually decreasing. But when I watched the women at the table just playing with their food, tasting a bit and making a face, I could believe it. And it was nouvelle cuisine. Each course was tiny. The only course they all finished was dessert.

The waiters reappeared and took orders for tea or coffee. The woman next to me said, "Anything is OK" which is the standard Japanese answer. In polite society your host is supposed to be attentive to your needs and provide what you want without you having to make any difficult choices. I have been to family dinners where friends have had to stop their mothers from piling food onto my plate by shouting, "She's a foreigner! She can choose for herself! Let her decide what she wants!" Anyway I said to the student that was OK to choose something but in the end she chose nothing. The woman on my other side chose tea but sat and stared at it like it was hemlock.

"Do you often go out for meals like this?" I asked the students, but they all said, no, that this was the first time in their lives they'd had such a meal, which surprised me. In Europe, we pick up good table manners as children and I hadn't thought there was much to learn about western-style dining. I was wrong. To the uninitiated it is an etiquette nightmare.

At the end of the meal, I asked them if they had enjoyed themselves and they said they would much rather have gone to Fukushima. But me, I loved it. And afterwards, I took a walk in Chinzan-so, the garden attached to the hotel. I hear that the Shangri-La is supposed to be the best hotel in Tokyo. I think the Four Seasons would come a close second. It's just a pity it is rather far from any of the main shopping or tourist centres.

Snow Days

(Preview of the panoramic view I'm going to have when S Building falls down and takes my office wall with it.)

Hello and a belated happy new year. For the first time in years I went back to the UK for Christmas. I didn't want to advertise the fact that my apartment was empty so I didn't blog. I don't actually know anyone who has been burgled in Japan, in fact I know many people who leave their doors unlocked when they go out. When I ask why they say that if anyone stops by they don't want them to have to wait outside because that would be bad manners. Still, apologies to those people who wrote and asked where I had gone. (I had gone to the Marks & Spencer sale for new velour trackie bottoms).

Now I am back in Japan and looking forward to a more upbeat 2012 albeit one without peppers, peaches, courgettes, carrots or spinach, all of which are in my supermarket right now but all of which are from Fukushima. And people are buying them. A Japanese colleague - the one who said that Japan was 'not like before' - also said that Japanese people 'feel it's our fault if we don't want to buy' things from the affected areas, like they're letting the side down. If they want to take the risk that is fine - the chances of adults becoming ill are apparently small - but they are also feeding the stuff to their children. You may have read of the Meiji milk incident where the company was forced to admit - after a consumer did their own testing and then made a complaint - that their baby formula contained radioactive Cesium 134 and 137.

And now we hear that there is a 70% chance of a 7 in Tokyo some time in the next 4 years. I think it may be sooner. I had just got into my Lush Vanilla Fountain bath last week - the night of the Chinese New Year as I recall - when all the water began to slosh from side to side and the shampoo bottles fell over but I refused to get out because it is freezing cold outside and the snow is still piled up at the roadsides. We had tremors just about every day last week. At one point I was talking with a student in my 9th floor office when her mobile phone quake warning alarm went off. "We are going to have an earthquake" she said and we waited. Then she dived into her bag and brought out her i-phone which said that the quake was up north again.

Yesterday I arrived at my office to find a brand new hard hat sitting on my desk. I put it on and adjusted it, and then jammed it into my locker. Not two minutes later the floor began to shake, the locker door swung open and the hat fell on the floor. Perhaps I'll keep it closer to my desk. When the next big one hits and I'm on the 9th floor of a 12 story building, that hat's going to be my first line of defence...

'S' building - which stands for Sincerity not shaky or shoddy - is being pulled down in the next couple of months, apparently before it falls down by itself according to office gossip. The word is that it is no longer quake-proof. It has a lot of hairline cracks running along the corridors and it abuts one wall of my office which has a wide crack in it too which seems to be getting wider the longer I stare at it (the crack not noticeably my office). I imagine myself sitting at my desk (with my hard hat on) during a quake and suddenly finding myself with a panaromic view of western Tokyo.

Now to the chores. I was woken up before 8am this morning by a cluster of little quakes so I got up and vowed to get all my errands done before the next Big One. Then I had a cup of tea and went right back to bed.

Yakult Lady

Yakult are recruiting new Yakult ladies to sell their yoghurt drink door-to-door in my neighbourhood. Well, the flyer says 'Yakult Staff' but I've never seen a man doing the job. The hours are 9 to 2 and you can earn more than 80,000 Yen. The flyer lists the daily routine as follows:

From 8.30 - Drop children off at nursery (Yakult seems to have a nursery which is 8,000 Yen per child per month.) Put on Yakult uniform and check appearance. Prepare your Yakult box and moped (Yakult mopeds are bright blue with cool boxes on the back).

From 9am - Check attendance and receive confirmation of absences. Cooperate and communicate with co-workers.

From 9.15 - Call on your area's customers. Find out about their health. Communication is important so deliver your products with a smile and full of sincerity.

From 12.30 to 2pm - Do administration at the Yakult centre. Eat your respective lunches. Clean up. Do preparation for the following days. Total up sales.

From 3pm - Pick up your children and return home.

They also have vacancies for cosmetic staff.

It's an example of 'parto', part-time jobs for housewives. It's the kind of job many of my female students want to do. They want to work for two years after graduation then quit to marry (with a kind, tall, very rich man they usually say), have two children - a girl and a boy, and do parto while their kids are at nursery. When they say this, the male students go very quiet because they know they've really got their work cut out to attract any woman in this recession and then financially support her and the children. Men tend to call housewives' lives, 'Three meals a day and an afternoon nap'. I don't really think such a life is viable any more, especially in Tokyo. Sorry girls.

Dere Santa

Dere Santa,

I hav bene a gude girl this year. Pleas can i hav a "camouflage slanket" from the Tokyu Crismas catalog so that i can sit in the parc and rede my book without kids shouting, "Mummy, Mummy, ther's a foreigner!"

Also, can i hav a geiger counta.

And a hazmat suit.

Thank yu, santa.

A Hands Christmas

Good call! Though personally, after the year I've had, I'm planning to get legless.

"Protecting smiles with fire-safety mind"

The Autumn Fire Prevention Campaign has begun! In our town, fire volunteers will tour the town from 7-10pm every night for a week and there will be a parade with 14 fire engines and other fire prevention vehicles. So nobody even light a match during that time because there will be no staff or vehicles available. This year's campaign slogans are, as usual, in Japlish rendering them unintelligible to Japanese and foreigners alike.

The installation of fire alarms only became mandatory in April this year. A maintenance guy turned up to install them in my place while I was watching a documentary on the origins of Fleetwood Mac (the Peter Green years) and we got on like a house on fi ... sorry. He was an old hippy; when he wasn't doing maintenance, he and his son played in a band. Sometimes you meet the coolest people at the oddest times.

So winter is on its way. Japanese homes have poor insulation and no central heating, so keeping warm is a mish-mash of kotatsu (a table with a heater underneath to keep your legs warm), hot carpet (keeps your bum cheeks warm but little else) and giant padded jackets. A lot of homes use kerosene heaters and it is not uncommon to see students with their eyebrows singed off from having the dial turned up too high when they turned it on. Which is why the annual fire prevention campaign is so important. First world country, third world heating. Smile!