What Do You Do In Times Of High Drama? Meditate.

On November 5^th was the annual Miyazu Area School's recitation contest at Miyazu High School where I was asked to be judge along with Rob and two of the high school English teachers. I went along as Kim my predecessor did for the years she was here as Maggie couldn't judge as they were her kids and she coached them. Had I known the nature of the competition I would have relinquished the honour.

I arrived at the high school at 9.45am, a little annoyed it was earlier than the originally planned 12.30pm, as a councillor from Nelson City Council was visiting Miyazu and Masako said I could join them for a boat ride around Miyazu Harbour that morning but the change in plans struck that one out. At the massive high school I was ushered into a small room near the main room the contest was to be held and given a briefing about scoring and such, then we entered the room. As with all events of this nature we had to sit through many, many speeches about trying your best and crap like that and the importance of English, do our bows to the audience and the heads of the schools represented then finally we began.

The kids read a short story of their choice from their textbook and we would mark them on correct expression and intonation of voice and other (when I asked if body movement and hand gestures was incorporated in other, I was given a 'I guess' so that's what I did to my own peril), pronunciation, flow, etc. All the kids did very well and I marked them accordingly, but one thing that annoyed me was that we were only given a minute to fill out comments on the score sheets before we would move on to the next participant. This was not enough time for me as I found with my first sheet I filled in. I watched the first student the entire time, then turned my attention to the sheet at the end. At this stage all the other judges had filled out their sheets and were tapping their pens impatiently as I wrote, so for the rest of the competition I did as they did, which led to disaster. My friend in the audience mentioned to me at the end people around her were saying “Why aren't the judges even looking at the students? Appearance is what they are judged on among other things, so how can they judge it without looking?” That's how I felt too. The focus was all on getting the comments about improvements written up and in such a short time period so we would finish on schedule that we missed out on most of the important things. Without this visual element this caused the scores to be skewed and had a lot of people asking outraged questions at the end. I was looking up every moment I could which was more than any of the other judges but it wasn't enough to gain a valid scope of their performance. My fellow AETs rounded up on me in the end demanding why the the winners were the people they least expected, and I looked back at my scores and it showed that their preferences were indeed my own, but the fact I was one of four people showed I was a in a minority against guessed results. I felt very ashamed I couldn't do anything to show the results were not fair and after the AETs saw how beaten I looked they let it go.

At the end we had to say a few words as judges about everyone's all over performance and I talked about something I noticed there was either a lack of or an over-abundance of – hand gestures. The few kids who did use gestures were Jay's students and their huge sweeping gestures were a bit of a distraction but but nice to see amongst the po-faced students. When I opened my mouth, by the looks of it I wasn't supposed to mention it. Afterwards Jay mentioned that in past years the kids were not to use hand gestures and him being expressive person he is leapt at the chance when the ban was lifted for this year. The other AETs stuck to the old rules not knowing if it would be accepted albeit frowned upon. English is a very expressive language, we have so many adjectives for single ideas that also express the richness of our language, while hand gestures add to it expression. Use them dammit.

Another point that skewed the results was each judges perspective on Japanese English. I'm used to hearing Japanese English spoken by elementary, middle and high school students so I could accurately assess their ability but for Rob who had only heard high school students and hadn't spoken Japanese before he arrived he gave harsh scores for pronunciation which was a bit unfair. In any case the when we had photos with the winners there was a lot of hushed talk among the audience about the mistakes the winners made. The girl who came second apparently made slip ups (I couldn't tell her from the results on the piece of paper, but I'm pretty sure I gave her a low score) but as I found out weeks later she was actually Yukari's daughter and she told me how happy she was to have gotten a place at her house, which kind of made me feel a bit better. Post contest nepotism. Great.

The place holders.

We finished a little earlier than planned so I sent a message to Masako to see if the guy from Nelson was still in town and they happened to be at the temple next door to the high school so I headed in that direction. Maggie had left a little before me and had been feeling a little out of sorts after she saw her student who had worked so hard for the competition not even receive a place but I called her back and we went to the temple together. We were greeted by several priests with shaved heads and priest kimonos who had been informed about our arrival and had been waiting for us inside the main hall that housed the Buddha. They welcomed us in and ushered us to a small meeting room where Masako, the councillor and the head priest sat around a long, low table. This was my first time speaking to a priest and being able to understand him or have Masako translating so I finally got to hear about their lives at the temple that I had wondered about for so long, but was unable to ask. All the men lived in the temple and meditated daily. Some had families in town and the youngest of the priests looked to be in his late 20s.

The head priest tries to discern what he is seeing.

The head priest said there were a number of ancient works of art around the temple and he took us to several rooms in the labyrinth of stairwells and narrow passages that was the temple, all new and clean looking in pine despite the ancientness of the temple. Finally, he took us to the meditation room which was used everyday by priests and travelling monks alike. This room had tatami covered platforms against every wall and dotted around the middle of the room separated by aisles, with low walls dividing each platform into four parts, so every meditator sitting on them faced a wall. In here we were shown the way to meditate, how far our small cushions could be from each edge of of platform, how to hold our fingers, arms and legs and how far closed our eyes had to be. A usual meditation would last 40 minutes we were told, but we did the quick 15 minute crash course, so it was over in no time.

We bid farewell to the priests and received little amulets from them that ensured good luck. The amulet was made up of a tiny cocoon made of cotton with a tiny slit down one side. When you open the slit you can see a minute Buddha sitting inside. We walked back through the temples large expanse of garden and the giant front gate, and headed for the car and our next destination waving to the assembled priests at the entrance.

Walking out the temple gate defeating the urge to mess up the pattern in the zen garden.

Our next stop was a small but very beautiful private garden in Kunda. This garden was well established from the deep rooted autumn maples, to the steam water etching in the bedrock. We stayed here chatting to the owner for a while as the sun slipped past the horizon and the garden was lit up by the warm orange lights streaming out of the lounge windows of the main house. Our final stop was also in Kunda and a place we had visited once before – the sake distillery. This time was different however. We did have a tour of the distillery but afterwards we were invited into the family home at the back of the distillery for some tea. Everything in the dining room was expensive looking. We sat at an elegant table looking at the ancient sake bottles displayed on the dresser as the master of the house apologised that his wife could not perform a proper tea ceremony for us, as we would run out of time. He bid Maggie and I welcome any time into their house to learn more about Japanese traditional culture and who know I may take him up on his offer despite knowing it's probably the usual empty promise of social manners.