Changes and Experiments
With less than a month of school left, it may seem a little silly to be making a lot of changes in my daily routine, but I've been experimenting with a couple things lately.

Other Classes
I've started inviting myself to watch some of the other classes at the junior high school, specifically the Social Studies classes and the Japanese classes.

At the junior high school level, the Social studies class is a catch all for history, geography, civics, and government studies. Japanese class is of course not for learners of Japanese like me, but, similar to English classes in the States, it is for studying literature, grammar for native speakers and (unique to Japan) learning new Kanji.

I understand easily less than half of what is being said. And there are long periods were I have no completely clue what the teacher is talking about. It is much like my experiments with attending Japanese church services. It can be a bit boring, and there is a temptation to daydream (although come to think of it, I was always a day dreamer even back in America). And also I find myself having to fight to keep myself from sleeping when I can't understand what is being said. (Although again, even back in America my record on staying awake during class was never flawless...)

But despite all this, I figure it is a great opportunity to be placed in Japan's public schools, and I wanted to get a sense for what some of the other classes were like before I packed up and left. Part of me wishes I had started doing this a long time ago, but I understand so little of what is being said even now, it might have been completely pointless to have started much earlier.

The literature classes I understand the least. The last class I observed the students were reading an old Chinese story (translated into Japanese of course), about how a unified China was torn apart by civil war many years ago. Really the only part I understood was when the teacher compared the feeling of the story to visiting the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima. The story was written in an attempt to try and make sense of all the death and war that had happened in the author's lifetime.

The Social Studies classes are a bit more interesting to me. I sat in on a geography class with the 7th grade students, and was surprised to find out they didn't know that much more about the geography of Japan than I did. I've sat in on a couple Japanese history classes, and learned that some war was fought long ago by Samurai (that was all I could glean from that particular class).

The government classes with the 9th grade class are by far the most interesting. I've sat through 3 of those now. We've been studying the Japanese constitution. It is interesting because of how closely it seems to resemble the government classes I had as a student. The Japanese students cover the same intellectual ground, learning about the Magna Carta and the glorious Revolution, Rousseau and John Locke, etc. I guess since the Japanese constitution was composed with the help of the occupation forces it shouldn't be surprising it is based on Western Philosophy, but it just seemed a bit odd in a Japanese class. No Asian thinkers were covered at all in the class.

Of course anyone familiar with Japanese politics [and I'm no expert, I should get that out of the way right now] knows that Japanese politics is not an exact copy of the West, and also the Japanese political system has a lot of problems with corruption. But the Japanese Social Studies teachers I observed, like their Western counterparts, seem to be focused on the ideals behind the government more than the practice. One class I sat through, which I thought was particularly good, was a discussion on what Freedom actually means.