Today was the beginning of the Yashiro Prison experience – aka the Hyogo Prefectural JETs Orientation – and Daniel’s birthday. Happy birthday, DJ! Yashiro is a smallish town up in the middle of the Hyogo Prefecture, and it’s where the Board of Education (BOE) training centre for teachers is, which houses us Wednesday-Thursday this week. It’s also a bit of a pain in the arse to get to, so I had to get up super early this morning to get on a bus from Akashi to get to the prison BOE headquarters. I was completely chuffed to find two people who are apparently my pretty close neighbours here around Akashi – Arjan and Rob – on the same bus. They are both really awesome guys, and can talk shit like champions, so the bus trip flew past and before we knew it we were there. We had a rather warm and sticky 25 minute walk to the headquarters, and got lots of other JETs waving at us out of taxis on their way up.
I had some pretty good roommates at Yashiro – Wendy from England, Cara from America and Christine from Canada. We dropped off our bags, made our beds, said our hellos and then went straight into the opening ceremony. It was a pretty formal affair – we had to each walk up on stage, get our names and period of employment read out, bow and receive our offical appointment documents. Which basically mean walking on stage, showing everyone else our butts, and then trying not to trip down the stairs. Just like graduation.
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| Christine getting her official appointment in the Opening Ceremony |
Classes were mostly pretty dry, but I guess there really isn’t a way to make reading over the Terms and Conditions of Employment exciting. It was the usual thing that happens when a bunch of adults get sat down and made to do classes like kids – everyone regressed back into sullen teenagehood for a little while, and stared daggers at whoever asked questions while willing them to shut up so we could get out of there.
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| Break between sessions. |
The last class of the day was quite good – a lady gave us a bit of a talk on the Hyogo Prefecture and various regional specialties for all of the 5 regions. I won a little phoenix doll thing, which is the mascot of the Hyogo Prefecture chosen after the great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake in 1995, which killed over 6000 people. I got it for guessing three questions right - finally, the PhD pays off!
To kill some time between the last seminar and dinner, a few of us walked to the conbini and got some drinks. I got a terrible grapefruit drink with shochu. Not making that mistake again – I just plain don’t like grapefruit, and I’m not sure what made me think that the addition of shochu would make it any better. Shochu-based flavoured drinks are called chuhai, byu the way, which is a portmanteau of shochu and highball – not really my thing, but I suspect that won’t stop me having a few large nights out involving chuhai.
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| This is the sign for the automatic toilet flush noise thing in the bathroom. I was impressed by that spectacularly beefy arm. Which no Japanese women have. |
After a pretty decent dinner, a lot of us sat around in the cafeteria drinking and chatting, and then we got invited into the kitchen to listen to a few of the cooks singing and playing guitar. They were pretty cool dudes, and unfortunately I didn’t take any photos. I’ve borrowed a photo off someone else who was there to show how cool these dudes were. We all sang the wrong words to lots of Beatles and 70’s music and had a great night. At 10:30 we were told to go to bed, and lights out was 11:00. There was a funny announcement to tell us that (I assume) in Japanese at 10:55. Thus ends the first night in prison…
Food Highlight of the Day: Fruit! We all took full advantage of the fact that they were giving us fruit, because the price of it is so high in the supermarkets, we were thrilled to be eating apples and grapes again. Sad but true. Even though the apples were soaked in salt water to prevent them browning, they were still delicious.
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