On the utter insanity of the English recitation contest

November 30, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

I wish I could convey the utter insanity of the English recitation contest. They are held every year, all over Japan, for Japanese schoolkids to demonstrate their mastery of English. Actually, there are two types of competition: the recitation contest, where all of the competitors recite a passage that has been chosen for them; and the speech contest, where the competitors write their own passage and then recite it. It sounds boring, and in many ways it is. In many other ways it’s just batshit crazy.

I have now attended two recitation contests, having coached several students in preparation for both. The challenges for most Japanese students of English are as follows: pronouncing the individual sounds; getting the intonation and breathing right; and remembering all the words. You’ll notice that understanding is not any sort of prerequisite. For my students there seems to be an additional challenge, which is just to understand how hard the students at other schools are prepared to work in their wild-eyed pursuit of victory. I know from their teachers that some of the winning students prepare for the competition a year in advance, and rehearse their lines almost every day – coming in at weekends in their bid to get the pronunciation right. I’m lucky if my students actually turn up after we’ve agreed a time for rehearsals.

To judge by the results on the day, though, they’re not alone. Like I say, words actually aren’t enough to convey the utter madness of spending three hours watching kids who can’t pronounce ‘th’ or ‘l’ or ‘r’ reciting the same, austere passage about a Japanese diplomat, with enough emotion for about fifteen Hollywood blockbusters and intonation that is just as much of a rollercoaster ride.

Some of them even use sign-language for emphasis. During most recent contest, for example, there’s a line that goes: “The youngest child, Hiroki, came to the window too, and asked his mother what the people outside wanted.” At that point, one of the students actually drew an imaginary window in the air, then crouched down and pretended to be a child peering over the windowsill and then looking up to his mother. On the one hand it’s just as well or otherwise I’d have had no idea what he was saying; on the other hand it’s a bit like one of those over-literal karaoke videos, and if I could have understood what he’d been saying, there’d have been no need for mime.

After the contest another English teacher was chatting to my student, explaining that it’s time to start practicing for next year’s competition. I don’t anticipate any rehearsals any time soon. As I say, my students just don’t understand how hard kids at other schools are prepared to work. And I don’t really blame them – I’m not sure learning a speech that they don’t understand is really going to help their English…

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Classroom discipline

November 22, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , ,

The single thing that I’m finding most difficult about my new life in Japan is classroom discipline. Which is something I never thought I’d say. As I think I mentioned already, while I was being oriented by the people in Tokyo, we were repeatedly warned that they handle discipline differently over here, and we were repeatedly told that warned that we are not responsible for discipline: since we are expected to be accompanied by another, proper, teacher at all times, we are also expected to let them maintain discipline so that we can get on with our jobs of being friendly and cheerful in English.

But like I say, we were warned that we might not see signs of discipline in the classroom, because, apparently, classroom discipline in Japan takes place outside the classroom: in the version described in Tokyo, classroom harmony is maintained by subject teachers using their own free time to work in tandem with homeroom teachers, parents and students to ensure good behaviour in lessons.

The only thing that has in common with the version that takes place in my classes is that I see no sign of discipline in the classroom. Many of my students don’t listen to me. They refuse to answer questions, or write down answers, or speak in English. They play with their DS, or their phone, or with playing cards that they’ve just made by ripping up the worksheet that I just gave them. They go to sleep on their desks. They play with scissors. They climb on their chairs to shout abuse at their friends in the back of the room. They swear at me in Japanese. And I am left to teach on my own fairly often, to cover for sick or otherwise absent teachers. Even when I am accompanied by another teacher, I’m pretty much expected to teach on my own, and it’s rare that the other teacher will intervene or assist me, other than to provide a perfunctory translation of anything that the students are finding difficult.

But I also see no sign of discipline outside the classroom, either. I mean, maybe it happens, but if it does, it certainly doesn’t trickle down to my classes. Every so often the students will be inspected to make sure that they are complying with rules about uniform: teachers will measure the length of the girls’ skirts with rulers, or cut the boys’ hair for them in the staff room to make sure it’s not too long. When we were looking for a flat, it turns out that the lady from the letting agency had a son who used to go to my school, until he got kicked out for not telling them that he’d taken his motorbike test (it would have been fine, if only he’d got permission). But nothing seems to be done about kids who spit chewing-gum on the floor during lessons, or kids who walk out of my classes. (That last one happened to me last week, in a lesson that I was teaching on my own.)

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. It’s not like all of this stuff happens all of the time. Most of my classes pass without incident: the most common form of misbehaviour is just a sullen, silent refusal to answer questions, rehearse dialogues, or to complete worksheets. And some classes are better behaved than others – usually in direct relation to the teacher who is teaching them. But there is not a week that passes without some example of badly behaving students. So I have been experimenting with different techniques.

I’ve started counting while waiting for the students to listen, which has mixed results. I’ve started making all of the students stand up until they answer questions (students who answer can choose to allow the students in their row or column to sit down too). I’ve started to cancel games in the middle if students misbehave. But I have yet to find a panacea, and so I still find my mood veering between extremes from class to class, depending on the students and how well the classes go, and I’ve found that my attitude towards the students has got progressively worse (and vice versa: I’m certainly no longer flavour of the month like I was back in August). I wish it wasn’t the case, because I would really like to help the minority of students who do seem to want to learn English. But I have yet to find a solution beyond the one that all of the other teachers seem to have fallen back on: not caring about misbehaving students. That’s not something I’m quite ready to accept. Like they say in Japan: Ganbarimasu! Onwards and upwards!

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Racist Japan

November 19, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , , ,

The Japanese are well racist – everyone knows that. Or the internet does anyway; log on to any expat forum and you’ll find it’s full of complaints and complainers. They call foreigners ‘gaijin’, which is bad, apparently. They don’t allow foreigners to rent houses, apparently. They won’t let you in to bars, or baths, and woe betide you if you’ve got a tattoo. All of these things are true, of course, but they’re equally true of pretty much any part of the world. My Japanese wife once went into a pub in proudly multicultural London only for the landlady to shout, “NO DVDs” at her. Presumably she assumed that my wife was a DVD or something, but she was actually just a Japanese woman, who wanted a piss. A year or two later, when we were trying to move to Hereford, several of the letting agencies had signs up on their doors saying that Polish people weren’t welcome. (About a year after that a schoolboy was stabbed to death about a hundred yards from our new house after a racially motivated altercation.)

I offer these anecdotes not to justify the racist behaviour that very clearly does exist in Japan; just to demonstrate that it is wrong to characterise Japan and the Japanese as any more racist than any other place or people. But, having hitherto had no firsthand experience of any sort of racism in Japan , I encountered my first bit over the weekend. I was visiting Shinjuku, in Tokyo, and I was in a rush so I asked a policeman for directions. In return, he asked me for my Gaikokujin Tourokushou (or 外国人登録証 for anyone with Japanese fonts installed). It’s a card that foreigners are, by law, required to carry (which, in itself, is a little bit racist, but not really, because while they don’t have to carry ID, Japanese nationals are expected to register themselves on various local registers).  

Anyway, by coincidence I had recently chanced upon firebrand foreigner Debitu Aruido’s advice for anyone who might find themselves asked to display their gaijin card. So I followed it and asked the policeman (who, actually, was probably some sort of community variant thereof) why he wanted to see my ID. He very politely told me that there were foreign criminals in the area, so it was just a spot check. And then he copied down all of my details, while chatting to me about Yamanashi, where I live, and how I met my wife etc. Once he’d done that, he very politely escorted me to where I needed to go.

As indignities go, it was a pretty dignified one. It was certainly less annoying than the two occasions that London’s police stopped me to see if getting blown up by terrorists had inspired me to carry a bomb in my bag (just as an FYI for the police: if I ever do decide to carry a bomb in my bag, I’m going to wait until the precise moment you accost me to search my bag, and then I’m going to blow it up). But I guess it was still an indignity. So I decided to seek my revenge by wreaking drunken havoc on my way home later that night.

Once upon a time, two or three years ago, I was on a train home from celebrating New Year’s Eve in Kamakura. It was about 3 or 4 am and the train was silent, because everybody was tired and cold. I was, like several other passengers, napping. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t silent. It was loud and American. A bunch of drunken foreigners got on the train. One of them was a short, fat, ponytailed guy with bad skin and a purple velvet suit. He proceeded to accost all of the passengers on the train, loudly, in English, to ask them if they’d had a nice night, or to ask them if they thought he was drunk, or whatever drunken idiocy had just occurred to him. I mean, he actually woke people. He woke me up! Sure, by that point, after enduring about ten minutes of this inebriated cabaret, I was only pretending to sleep. But still, he woke me up. I didn’t reply. I just glared. Apparently I glared pretty badly, because at that point his friends shushed him and he sat down with a drunkenly exaggerated apology.

On Saturday night, in return for being asked for my gaijin card, I became that foreigner. Having consumed lots of sake, plum wine, and lager with a friend from university, I proceeded to disturb the last train silence by using LOUD PIDGIN JAPANESE to ask if I was on the right train, or which station to change from the express to the local train, or if this was the right stop etc. And then I met my wife in a local family restaurant where I messed up everyone’s wa by explaining that MY WIFE IS ALREADY HERE and taking up too much room at the table etc.

In retrospect it’s a bit embarrassing. But it’s only what racist Japan had coming to it.

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I signed up for this?

November 12, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

So yes, I’m In Japan. I’ve been in Japan since August, as a participant of the JET programme, which is a scheme that places mostly English-speaking foreigners into Japanese classrooms as Assistant Language Teachers. I applied for a place on the programme around this time last year, for several reasons. One is that I wanted to improve my ability to speak and understand Japanese. Another is that I wanted to regain control of my leisure hours, having spent the last ten years doing various jobs that make a mockery of 9-to-5. And having been inspired by so many of the people who taught me, I also wanted to see if I could teach, and if I enjoyed it.

Having done quite a lot of research into other people’s JET experiences, it seemed to me that my biggest problem in Japan was likely to be filling up all of my free time. On the internet, the most common criticism of the JET experience seemed to be (and still seems to be!) that JETs are given very little to do; on the internet the most common grip seems to be that many JETs spend little time in the classroom, and they spend that time simply reciting words and phrases at their fellow teacher’s direction – a practice that has given rise to the phrase ‘human tape recorder’.

My reality is very different. Almost entirely the opposite, in fact: I’m mostly too busy to study Japanese; I have spent more than one night working into the early hours devising lesson plans; and I don’t really have complete freedom to teach, because I have to slot my lessons into someone else’s curriculum.

I’ve been told that most of the JETs in my prefecture teach between four and twelve lessons a week. That seems very low to me, because I know several who teach at least as many hours as me (perhaps the reason there aren’t so many JETs complaining about working too hard is because they’re too busy working to use the internet). I teach about nineteen hours of lessons a week, eighteen of which I have to plan. Apart from teaching, I also have to coach students for various recitation contests, I have to supervise the cleaning of one of the school corridors, and I have to do marking (which can take as much time as the lesson itself). Twice each term, I also have to devise and mark tests for all of my classes. It often adds up to more hours than there are in a 9-to-5 week.

One of the weird things about all of these lessons, though, is that I basically teach them all on my own. In theory, ALTs are supposed to work with a Japanese teacher, working in tandem to promote English-speaking and cultural harmony. In practice, it seems that most ALTs find themselves reciting words and phrases, but like I say, my experience is different: my experience is that the other teacher (there are eight in my school) just sits in the room and watches me give my lesson. The weird thing about that is that I have no idea what these students learn in the rest of their classes. Their textbooks contain an impenetrable jumble of prose and grammar points, arranged in a seemingly random fashion, and the other teachers seem to unwilling or unable to provide me with any clarity, except to ask me to base my lessons on the textbook.

Since I’m following these randomly arranged textbooks, I don’t have the freedom to devise my own curriculum. The problem with that is that the majority of my students don’t seem to be able to understand the textbook. At a recent conference for ALTs, I discovered that I use the same textbook with my third-year students as other schools use with their first-years – except those first-years seem to be able to understand it better than my third-years. That makes basing lessons on the textbook pretty fruitless, so mostly I just steal lessons for younger students off the internet. And the problem with *that* is that all of the teaching resources online seem to be aimed at adults, or elementary school kids, or assume that students have acquired some knowledge of English over the course of their studies. Or they’re written by imbeciles. There are even – laughably – lesson plans online that assume students will be quite happy to find a partner and practice saying some pre-prepared snippet of English dialogue to each other. Three months into my lessons, I have yet to see a single student voluntarily speaking any English in the classroom.

So I plug away, with my games of Pictionary, or charades, convincing myself that these are in some way helping my students to increase their comprehension of English, even though I would much rather just have them repeat English sentences after me for 50 minutes each lesson. And the other teachers continue to offer me pretty much no feedback on whether they think my lessons are relevant or useful to the students (even though I have been diligently giving them feedback questionnaires, as requested by the organisers of the JET scheme – most of them aren’t returned).

And I’m so busy doing so, that I have no time to improve my Japanese. I am expected to speak English in the classroom, my wife refuses to speak to me in Japanese at home, and outside of classes, I’m too busy to speak to anyone in Japanese. So while there are many other upsides, I’m not sure that the JET experience has been a resounding success in terms of my original aims.

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A moving story

November 5, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , ,

I’ve just moved house. You might remember I was living in a complete shithole. So we looked for a new place, and we found one, and now we’re living in it.

I’m surprised at how simple it all was. Having read so much and been told so often about racist Japanese landlords and letting agencies, I was expecting to have a hard time finding a new place. I guess it helps that my wife is Japanese, but I’m not sure how much: on email (which is how she corresponded with most of the letting agencies) she has a western surname; and even just the other month, the assistant French language at my school told me that even though he has a French wife, he had found it difficult to find somewhere to live.

But after a few weeks of hard searching, my wife finally found a bigger, newer apartment, a little bit further away from my school, but with a twentieth century toilet and in front of a cute little park. To help us move our belongings, we hired a man with a van. In my experience, of English man-with-vans, their vans tend to be pretty small and they expect you to do half the work. Our Japanese man with a van turned up about half an hour early. Peering out of our (old) window, I could see that his van was also small, and full of stuff. Then he set to work. First, he transformed his van, lifting the roof and sides to make it bigger. Next, he took out all of his stuff, which turned out to be a series of straps, wrapping, and blankets that he laid down on our floor to keep the floor clean and our belongings from getting broken by the floor. Then, finally, he came inside and insisted that we didn’t lift a finger. He carried everything, and I mean everything, including our washing-machine, on his own – wrapping it carefully and then filling up his van like he was playing some massive puzzle from Professor Layton.

At the other end, he unloaded everything with the same meticulous neatness, installed our washing-machine with replacement parts from his own supply, and then gave us a discount because he did it so quickly, so we got the whole thing for about fifty quid. And he wouldn’t even accept a drink!

So now we’re living in a new apartment, we’ve got a huge new fridge, a brand new telly, and a Iovely sofa bed. But the best bit is that I can now, finally take a shit in a real toilet, without my knees banging against the door.

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Sports Day

October 28, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , ,

It was the school sports day the other day. Actually, it was more of a sports festival: they already had their sports day, and this was something different. So instead of competing at track and field, all of the school’s 800 students took part in risibly simplistic physical tasks that are phased out of British sports days after infants. I would not have been surprised if they’d wheeled out some eggs and spoons or some sacks for racing.

The event started with a three-legged obstacle race. A three-legged obstacle race! With their legs strapped together, pairs of students had to duck under hurdles, throw sponges into distant bowls, blow up and then stamp on some balloons and, finally, jump up to reach a candy hanging on a string (with a cruel twist, these were at different heights, so laterunners had to jump higher; how the boys enjoyed it when one unlucky pair of girls had to try to lift each other up). The three-legged obstacle race set the tone for the rest of the day: there was tug-of-war featuring teams of about 30 on each side; a similar event where students faced each other before racing to grab objects that were placed in between them to drag them back to their starting positions; a ‘borrowing race’, in which students had to run around trying to ‘borrow’ various objects (objects like English teachers, for example, which is how I ended up being borrowed and running around); until the day reached its climax with a relay race. Featuring teams of about 15 runners.

It probably sounds pretty silly – mostly because it was pretty silly. But I was struck by the way all of the events required and encouraged some sort of co-operation among the students; and also by the way that all of the students seemed to enjoy it. I can imagine that British sports days and school competitions might be a pretty lonely place if you’re no good at sports (and I can only imagine because I’m brilliant at sports, obviously). But here I didn’t see any of the slower students getting ridiculed by the sporty kids; I just saw them getting a load of encouragement (even when some of the massive relay teams saw a fat kid wasting a previously unassailable lead). In fact, there’s a male student at my school who identifies as a female. In the land that coined the proverb, ‘the nail that stands out gets hammered down’, you might expect such a kid to be in for a fair amount of stick. Again, nothing but encouragement. (During regular lessons he does appear to be shunned by the other male students, but no more so than they all the other female students are shunned…)

So in the end, I was pretty impressed with the school sports day/festival/whatever. I continue to be surprised, though, by the lack of effort that the school’s English teachers make to speak to me at school. Even though I spent the day hanging around redundantly like a third tit, not a single member of the English department made any attempt to speak to me, or to explain what was going on or tell me what I should be doing. Instead, I spent the day chatting in my feeble Japanese, to other teachers and students. Maybe it’s because the other teachers aren’t confident enough in their English, or maybe they just don’t like me. Anyway, I’m sure it’s something I’ll get back to another time…

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Looking for somewhere nice to live?

October 18, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

Posh Flat

Posh Flat

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Still alive – or it turns out my brain’s fine

October 18, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , ,

So having survived the massively exaggerated risks of eating fugu, it turned out that I was still experiencing dizzy spells and headaches – which provided the pretext for my first experience of Japanese healthcare.

My symptoms were minor: last Friday some of my students pointed out that one of my eyes was very bloodshot. On the same day I started to feel dizzy: there were some guests in school and as I walked past one of them in the corridor, I nodded at him in greeting and found myself staggering to the side. I remember hoping that he wouldn’t think I was drunk. And then in the evening a minor pain in my toe started to spread to the whole of my foot.

I then took what was probably the unwisest course of action: I looked up my symptoms on the internet. Like Holden Caulfield, I became giddy with the sheer vista of improbable medical possibilities: maybe I had a trapped nerve. Maybe a brain tumour! What about mad cow disease?!! Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been just a bloodshot eye, a sore foot and a bit of dizziness. It was, so the internet told me, pretty conclusively some sort of degenerative brain-wasting disease.

Under the circumstances, I think I coped extraordinarily well. I drank through the symptoms, and the pain, for the bank holiday weekend, enjoying vintage Dom Perignon with sukiyaki on the Saturday; ice-cold beers in the park for a barbecue on the Sunday; and a bit of sake to wash down all the endangered species that I ate on Monday. Unfortunately, though, alcohol did nothing to halt my nervous system’s imminent demise, so on Wednesday morning, we went to the hospital.

It was very different to going to the hospital in Britain. Entering the lobby felt like wandering into the leafy, sculpture-filled interior of a high-end hotel (complete with a pretty classy coffee-shop just off the main atrium). At the reception an army of neatly uniformed staff inquired as to my symptoms: in Japan, it seems, all of the doctors are specialised, and you need to see whichever one specialises in your ailment. Since my symptoms were so broad, the receptionist decided that the best course of action was to send me to a doctor who specialised in brain and nerve ailments, in order to rule out the possibility of any horrible brain-wasting disease.

So then we sat in a very busy, but meticulously clean waiting room for about ten minutes before we were called in to see a nurse. Then we saw the doctor, who suggested that I have a brain scan, a heart scan, and some blood tests. And so we did. Inside two hours. In a public hospital. I mean, two hours later, we were sitting in front of the doctor again, and she was showing me my results: the black and white photos of my brain, taken by lying me down inside some spacey cylinder that beamed lasers at my head; a printout that showed everything in my blood; and a computer screen showing me that my heart was working fine, and was beating 48 times a minute when they laid me down on a bed and strapped me to some electrodes.

It turns out I’m completely fine. I have nothing to worry about, apparently.

And for this peace of mind, I paid about £60, which I hope will be covered by my employer’s health insurance. That sum is the two-thirds of the cost that isn’t covered by my national health insurance. It is, of course, £60 more than I would have had to pay on the NHS. But I don’t think I would ever have been offered a brain scan on the NHS, and if I had been, I would have had to wait for weeks and spent hours sitting in grotty waiting rooms. I am a massive supporter of the principle behind the NHS, but in practice it is decades behind my one experience of the Japanese health system.

Anyway, to celebrate, we decided to have a nabe at home, which is a sort of casserole cooked at the table. It’s cooked on portable stove. I burnt my fingers on that portable stove so hard that they actually sizzled – so much that my wife heard them in the next room. I guess the Japanese medical establishment has yet to come up with a cure for irony.

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Strange foods

October 15, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , , ,

I’ve just eaten some whale. Accidentally, obviously. They put it in front of me at a sushi restaurant and I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t want to be rude. It looked like it could have been some sort of mushroom. Or meat. Or fish. Or anything, really. It was just a couple of brown, slimy-looking cubes of something, surrounded by a few salady things. After I’d eaten I was no clearer as to what it was, and nor were my hosts – my wife’s parents, who had decided to treat us to dinner. So we sat around discussing what it might be. Some sort of fatty fish, maybe, or pork – except it tastes more like beef. Whatever it was, it was pretty tasty – five stars, will eat again!!! sort of tasty. Except then we asked what it was and they told us it was whale and it became five stars, will eat again if it doesn’t involve the mass slaughter of a possibly nearly extinct cetacean mammal!!! sort of tasty.

I also ate Ocean Sunfish, which is banned in the EU, apparently. But that’s not quite as glamorously contrarian as eating whale, right? Again, I didn’t know what it was at the time. My wife told me it was tuna. It was obviously not tuna, but I assumed she was telling me it was tuna in case I wouldn’t eat it if I knew it was something else, so I went ahead and ate it anyway. It didn’t taste like tuna. But it was still tasty like tuna, so I went ahead and kept eating it. It was only after the meal, on our way out, that my wife’s mother realised that it was ocean sunfish we’d been eating. I don’t know much about ocean sunfish, but apparently it’s a huge (man-sized), odd-looking fish that likes to swim horizontally. It’s also nice and helpful, apparently, and there are stories of them helping drowning swimmers – so my wife’s mother got upset that she’d eaten it. She didn’t seem to care about the whale.

But before we left the restaurant, I also ate fugu. It’s a favourite of my father-in-law, so he ordered a plate of fugu sashimi, which turned out to be delicious, eaten with some sort of ponzu dipping sauce. It’s also, of course, poisonous , if it isn’t prepared properly. Japanese chefs have to pass a rigorous test involving years of study before they can prepare fugu for consumption, and after they’ve prepared the fish they have to dispose of the poisonous waste in a padlocked bin. There is a famous story of a Japanese actor who demanded to be fed seven fugu livers, claiming that he was immune to the poison. He died, obviously. According to some people on the internet, the symptoms of fugu poisoning ‘may include dizziness, exhaustion, headache, nausea, or difficulty breathing.’ The weekend before eating fugu, I had been experiencing dizziness, exhaustion, and headaches. So maybe it wasn’t the best time to eat it.

But I’m still alive. More on that later.

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Football

October 8, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , , ,

In the same week that it all kicked off after West Ham and Millwall kicked off, I went to see a football match in my new home. I went to see my local team: Kofu Vanforet (named after the war banner of Kofu’s most famous historical figure, Takeda Shingen).

Vanforet

Football is a bit different in Japan.

For a start, we got there about an hour before the game, and so did everybody else – after paying about a fiver to get in. I mean we actually got to our seats about an hour before the game – not a nearby pub – and instead of drinking aggressively until the last possible minute before kick-off, we chatted over a leisurely beer and soaked up the atmosphere. And what an atmosphere: as the evening faded gradually into night, the floodlights came on and a cool breeze blew in off the mountains, visible in the distance silhouetted over the opposite stand. It felt like an occasion.

It wasn’t really; it was just a second-division kickabout. Nobody seemed to tell that to the players, however, who came out before the game and bowed to the fans before resuming their warm-ups, and as each player’s name was read out and their photo and stats shown on the big screen, the fans sang a different song for each one. Nobody had told the ballboys, either, who took up position around the centre circle and bowed while the medical teams did a lap of honour shortly before kick-off. And the pre-match activities were only complete when the teams lined up on the halfway line, like it was an international match or something.

As far as the crowd was concerned, it might as well have been an international: one entire section of the crowed sang for the entire game, pogoing in unison for 90 minutes without pause, while some of their number waved enormous pennants to an unceasing drumbeat. Over where I was sat, things were a bit more sedate, but I was struck by the real range of people who were watching. I was watching the game with another teacher from my school, who has been a lifelong supporter of the team. He was there with his wife, and we bumped into his cousin, but the real surprise was that we also met his mother, who must be in her eighties. And she wasn’t alone: there were both women and old people in abundance. Though English soccer is often proclaimed to be a family sport, I’ve never seen such a wide representation of different ages as at this match, and the results were a much more inclusive, welcoming atmosphere.

I understand the historical reasons for the different demographic. And I’m sure there’s something to be said for paying 30 or 40 quid to watch some lower league hackers hoof the ball around while their fans take their tops off and make slitting-throat gestures; or sitting in silence in case the home fans realise that you’re sitting in the wrong section of the ground; or paying more and watching a bald-headed Chelsea fan encourage his daughter to swear at the ref. It’s just that at the moment – basking in the afterglow of the festival atmosphere at Vannforet – I can’t think what it could be.

As for the football: at the highest levels all football tends to blend together in a sublime mixture of skill, organisation and fitness. At the lower levels, though, the differences become increasingly apparent. Compared to the directness of British football, Japanese football feels more South American (indeed my local team, Vannforet, actually has three or four Brazilians on its books). There is a lot of quick, short passing, and plenty of individual technique. In front of goal, though, they lacked finish and seemed reluctant to actually shoot. In the end, the game was decided by the ref, who awarded two dodgy penalties and then failed to award one for the only real claim. In fact, in a match that was played in a good spirit, with few fouls and few bookings, that was the only point of controversy: when a Vannforet player was kicked in the chest in the penalty area in the dying minutes of the game, the ref blew for full time, instead of for a penalty.

So, dodgy refs. Along with the dodgy toilets (the only sign of football squalor in an otherwise immaculate stadium), some things are the same the world over.

Vanforet 2

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