Japanese Saturday School // 日本語土曜日学校

節分祭：アメリカンスタイル

Last week, Kayla of Kayla June told us about the Japanese Saturday School at the university where she teaches. I knew of Saturday schools, a popular way for expat Japanese families to keep their kids up-to-speed with Japanese culture and academics. I just did not realize that there was one in Jacksonville, our nearest city. The school started in 2011 and now serves over 50 families from the area. Starting from preschool and extending to the sixth grade, it is run by volunteer parents who use the official Japanese public school textbooks and curriculum as a guide. They are so above board that they anticipate to be recognized by the Japanese government in the coming year. Pretty rad, ne?

We attended their open house this past Saturday and were really impressed. For three hours every Saturday, Sebastian and Nico can study kanji, mathematics, and reading while making friends with other bicultural kids. Every other Saturday, Colette can join the preschool class where they sing songs, make crafts, and learn to read and write in hiragana. 

Being there amongst a crowd of bilingual/bicultural families was such a wonderful thing. We all felt it, a sense of belonging, a sense of relief. To be able to hear Japanese all around us, to be able to laugh at the same jokes, to hold our cameras high as the children threw beans at the demons: I cannot express completely what a fantastic occasion this was for all of us. You can take the family out of Japan, but you can't take Japan out of the family. 

The change in Sebastian and Nicolai was immediate. They walked differently back to the car, tall from their proud, straight spines. They stopped bickering and started helping each other, taking turns carrying their heavy bags across the campus. I knew that they had been frustrated that their bilingual/bicultural needs were not being met in the past few months, but it was not until after Saturday school that I saw what a toll it had been taking on them. It was as if the sun had been covered with clouds for the past seven months and suddenly a clear wind blew them away. 

We will definitely be going again. 

Belated

In one of my discussion classes at the college where I teach, we were talking about the kanji of the year for 2011. One of the students asked the question, what is your personal kanji of the year and this was met with the silence of contemplation (a special Japanese silence that gets some getting used to). Following this hushed lull in the discussion, most of the students said that they agree with the selected kanji, which means bonds. One student offered that she would choose the kanji for 'tear' as she can't remember a year when she cried so much. Naturally this made the rest of us rather sad so we came to the consensus that 'bonds' was the best way to sum up 2011.

After a few days of passive consideration, I have decided that my kanji would be something like this: 手後れ [ておくれ]. It isn't so great since there are two kanji and the hiragana 're' there but it is the rough translation of my word for the year: belated.
2011 has been nothing but a race against the clock. And not just one single race, but multiple races sometimes held simultaneously. We have a poor record this year, I'm afraid. We lost the first one back in January when we forgot to renew Colette's visa on time. Since then, it has really been a struggle.

Take the back-to-back birthdays last month. We are simply lucky that Nico is super understanding and that Colette is too young to complain. We did eventually make it up to them but it was not within the week of their official birthdays.

This is Nico at his school birthday party with the beloved Doraemon birthday crown.

And this is Nico with his girlfriend Miyu-chan. Though don't tell him I called her that. He considers himself simply tolerant of Miyu-chan's exuberant affections.

So, as much as belated is perhaps a less positive way to describe a year, I consider it to be an honest and rather malleable term. It doesn't equate failure but signifies the effort to catch up, despite the odds of winning. We leave this year tired of always being behind but feeling stronger for the effort it took to continue. I hope that next year I will get to choose a better word like 'amazing' or 'crazy successful' but knowing that 76 percent of Americans (according to a recent NBC/WSJ poll) consider 2011 to be either below average or one of the worst years of their lives, I think belated isn't such a bad term to own.