Toya Day 59: Social Welfare and the Kara-age Kid

Today marked something rather momentous – we were about to visit the last of our regular jobs! This was the Social Welfare group – the Fureiai Group, which apparently translates as Friendship Group, and it’s with the elderly people of Toya.

We arrived and were greeted by the leaders of the group, one of whom spoke fairly good English. Our role in the Social Welfare group is more as volunteers and helpers than teachers, so it’s a different job to the rest. Even in the Nurseries, we work as aides and provide some teaching role, even if such teaching is very limited. It’s hard to describe what I’m getting at – suffice it to say the Social Welfare Group is far removed from the rest!

This is what Japanese Old People look like 😉

I was actually surprised at how busy it was. There were perhaps 30 or 35 people there, the youngest being 72 and the oldest being 92! It would have been interesting to talk to some of them in Japanese, but sadly, we aren’t that good yet!

They began with a bit of a song, and then the leader gave a speech. Eventually, as we were surprised to notice, the children from the Toya and Sakura Nurseries came, complete with their costumes from the Culture Festival! Only the older children performed – so that meant the Taiko drum song, too! We once again donned our Gi and played the start of the drum song! The other kids then performed their songs, doing as good a job as ever. I want that CD, though!

After that, we served tea, and then lunch. After that, one of the people showed us his hobby – papercrafts! He showed us a little bit of origami, and then he made some paper butterflies with a pair of scissors. After that, however, it was time to pack away, so we did, and left for the Sogo Centre.

Origami is a difficult! But the guy was very good at it.

Nothing exceptional happened here – really, it was just a bit of web browsing now that the week’s toil is almost over!

When we’d done there, we headed for the Seicomart to buy things for dinner. Of course, we bought our chicken, our garlic and our other ingredients without an issue in the A-Coop. But when we did go into the Seicomart, who should we see but that kid who calls me Kara-age Sensei? Since the boxes were in abundance, and it would be amusing – I bought the kid some Kara-age 😉 His new name? Kara-age Gakkosei – Kara-age Student!

For dinner, we cooked chicken in a white wine reduction. The recipe is thus:

Similar to this, but with oregano instead of rosemary and breasts instead of thighs.

Put a small amount of oil and butter into a pan and melt over a medium heat. Put in four minced cloves of garlic, brown, and add two whole chicken breasts. Season both sides, and then brown the skin side. Sprinkle on just enough oregano to cover one side of the chicken, and then pour in enough white wine to almost cover the chicken. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat to simmer, and flip the chicken a few times to distribute the oregano around the pan. Then, cook over a medium heat until the internal temperature of the chicken reaches 72 degrees Celsius. Serve with rice and pour the sauce over the plate. Enjoy 😉

In the evening, we went to Kendo again, and we further practiced. Nothing particularly interesting happened – we’d fumikomi’d and men’d some more, and then we went to the Onsen! The Onsen is always awesome, and it was no different today. Thursdays are also a good day for them, being as they are by far our busiest day!

Toya Day 58: Oh, Taka-san…

Interesting things happened in the Adult Class tonight 😉 But I’ll come on to that later, because first, the apocalypse had to come.

The Mother-Kid’s Club.

After the small rebellion that happened last time we were there, to say that we were somewhat nervous would be an understatement! We’d planned for it, but the concept of it is so… bizarre that it’s difficult to grasp at times.

At least we got an extra hour in bed.

It’s a wonderful thing 😉

We went to the Mother Kid’s Club and arrived in good time. We began by learning the Alphabet Song, and then we moved on to Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. We continued with the song ‘Seven Steps’ on the CD that Naomi-sensei lent to us. The book saved our hides! We ran out of plan way before the end of the session, so we improvised on other songs from the book – it’s so good, I bought a copy! We ended up doing ‘And Bingo was his Name-O’, ‘If all the Raindrops were Lemondrops and Gumdrops’ and ‘Ten Fat Sausages’, and we read a storybook. And they totally didn’t notice that we were winging it!

Thank holy God it was over, though!

A couple of hours later, Taka came to the Sogo Centre to give us a Japanese lesson, and we spent the time focusing on Hiragana – me and Brendan got about half each from memory. In a lot of real-life situations, it’s fairly easy to cheat and work things out based on context – for example, in the Toya Nursery there’s a room called the Lion Room – written as ‘らいおん’. We know that ‘i’ is ‘い’, ‘お’ is ‘ん’ and ‘n’ is ”, so we can work out that the ‘ら’ is ‘ra’ because there’s the picture of the lion (of course, distinct ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds don’t exist in Japanese and are rolled into one).

Anyway, we did practice on several words and we learned some Japanese grammar. It was interesting and it was helpful. It also shed light on some of our queries about the Japanese language, so it was helpful!

In the later afternoon, we discussed with Erica the possibility of going on some of the School Field Trips – we can’t really go with the Elementary School because their trips are all in holiday time, so we have to beg either Kamada-sensei or Nishita-sensei to see if we can go with the High School or Junior High 😉 Day trips, though, might be possible.

Japan is big and if we could tag along on any of the trips to explore it, all the better!

So, the evening was the Adult Class. For the most part, this was fairly similar to last week insofar as we were analysing the book again. However, something happened which spiced up proceedings a bit 😉

As it turned out, I had Naomi-Sensei’s CD still in my bag from the morning, and I was going to be damned if I let that go to waste. I rushed downstairs to borrow the CD Player, and brought it back up with me after borrowing the key from Troublemaker-san.

It was a small class, but I gave them the choice – did they want to learn English, or sing and dance? I was surprised when they said the latter! Rather, two of them did, but in a class of three Taka-san was still outvoted 😉 I promptly invited them to go over to Brendan’s class  😉 Still, we went through ‘Seven Steps’ and I got Taka to dance! It was a moment of sheer brilliance 😉 He suggested doing it as a regular warm-up activity!