Japan Is Doomed

I am now in Hokkaido!

The start of winter means the start of many exciting things - snow falling, Christmas coming, and if you’re lucky no school or work for a while. Sadly, Japanese students are not lucky, as they’ll be working right up until about the 20th of December. Even worse news is that they’ll all be sitting tests in every subject they study. Whilst this may sound all bad, it does mean that we get to read some hilarious answers to questions.

The seniors came up with the most comedy gold between them. One question in particular stands out in my memory as being particularly tricky. The exercise was to listen to the recording and fill in the blanks. The story is something about a man called Adam going to Canada expecting it to be cold, but it’s actually warm when he goes. He says the line “I completely took the wrong clothes!” where “wrong” is the missing word.

Below are a couple of my favourite answers;

• I completely took the long clothes. (A lot of students wrote this one. I know they believe all foreigners are 7″ behemoths but come on…)
• I completely took the Florida clothes. (I wanted to give this one a mark because many Japanese kids don’t even know other countries exist, never mind names of places inside them.)
• I completely took the no clothes. (Thank goodness you packed your no clothes otherwise you’d be inappropriately dressed at the no parties they are always having in America.)
• I completely took the clothes clothes. (But did you bring the clothes clothes clothes?)
• I completely took the cute clothes. (Suprisingly few students wrote this.)
• I completely took the complete clothes. (Everyone knows in Canada you wear clothes which are ripped to shreds.)

and so on. The other great line was from one student, who was meant to write “coffee” to finish the sentance “Shall we order some more”. What did we get instead?

• Shall we order some more crap?

Based on what I drank in Canada he may not be far off.

Because my roommate was sick I had an extra two days in Tokyo, so I went in to help marking and putting all the numbers together and then taking them apart and adding them back together again to make pretty patterns on graphs because that’s the way it’s done in Japan. Don’t ask me why.

This concludes the first of many updates I hope to post today. I also hope to film a video blog post if I get the chance. If I don’t you’ll just have to pretend you can see me shivering in the snow.