As soon as I got up in the morning, I began answering emails and searching for business information, handing the material over to AI for analysis and holding a meeting with a Japanese company where people could speak Chinese.
The subject of the meeting was quite simply not my field, so it did not last very long.
I have also gradually begun to suspect that the reason I received so few replies while I was still in Germany may have been, on the one hand, that the budget was set too low and, on the other, that most of the companies with internationally minded, English-speaking staff come from Tokyo.
So perhaps this is also a question of where people are being drawn.
I even came across one vendor that replied very quickly, and the person handling our project had, as it turned out, also studied in Germany.
That is what I kept saying. How could it possibly be so difficult to find people who speak English in a place as international as Japan? So they had all gone to Tokyo?
In any case, to speed up the project analysis, I opened different tasks under different accounts and had the Agents communicate with one another.
I may still need rather more practice at managing Agents, however. Sometimes even I lose track of which job I assigned to which Agent.
For the first time, I also witnessed the legendary phenomenon of an Agent opening still more branches and setting other Agents to work.
We had a new teacher at school today. It seems the teachers rotate from one day to the next.
This way of holding classes feels quite novel to me. It must mean that, compared with Germany, a language school needs a remarkably large reserve of teachers.
While introducing herself, today’s teacher said that she had taught Japanese at a university in China several years ago, before moving back to Japan.
A remarkably handsome male student also appeared in class today, with his face and hair styled as if he had stepped straight out of a manga.
He is from Turkey, yet his face looks uncannily like one of those handsome mixed-race men in manga. My instinctive reaction was to wonder whether he might have had something done to it…
That sort of face would probably be very popular in Asia. In Europe, or in Turkey, which is a country where religion has already been secularised, I suspect that a boy with such androgynous qualities would face a fairly high chance of being bullied.
So is it only natural that someone with those qualities would choose to come to Japan?
Today’s teacher took particular care to explain that the school has attendance requirements. Only students whose attendance exceeds ninety per cent will receive a letter of recommendation from the school; attendance of eighty per cent is required for a course certificate; at sixty per cent, a student’s family will receive a notice or warning; and if attendance falls to fifty per cent or below, immigration will be notified, which may make it impossible to obtain a visa in the future.
If someone is absent for three consecutive days without telling either the teacher or their classmates, the teacher will visit their residence.
This rather parental style of supervision set another German compatriot and the Russian student beside him whispering to one another.
Speaking of that Russian classmate, I felt a little too awkward to ask how he had managed to get out.
Classes this week are really only a period for finding the right level. If students discover that the class does not suit them, they may apply to move to another one.
The teacher therefore made a special point of telling us not to mark our textbooks in any way this week.
I thought: Teacher, you are too late. I had already written notes in the textbook yesterday.
Still, I have no intention of changing classes, so it does not matter.
The school said that each term lasts three months and that students who pass the examination can advance to the next level.
They also announced how many examinations there would be over the entire course of study, stressing in particular that too many people know how to sit exams but cannot speak, so the school would also strengthen our spoken language skills.
Hearing the teacher say this, I could not help wondering when the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test might be reformed as well and introduce an oral component.
Perhaps because students are still being given time to assess their own level, I felt that the teacher did not follow the textbook lessons in full during class, but repeatedly used only the grammar sections for practice.
We also had a lesson in Kansai speech.
In truth, I have always felt that describing the difference between Kansai and Kanto as an “accent” is not quite accurate, because this is not merely a question of intonation.
It is like Austrian German or Swiss German: the vocabulary itself is already different. Germany, too, is divided into regional “dialects,” which differ from one another in both vocabulary and accent.
Although it is a little embarrassing to admit, I spent a very long time in Germany and lived in Franconia for more than ten years, yet I still cannot really pick out the Franconian dialect. Besides, with a face like mine, Germans generally speak nothing but Standard German to me.
Even when they may have quietly slipped a few dialect words into their speech, I could still understand the meaning despite not knowing the words themselves. My ears therefore never learnt how to distinguish one dialect from another.
For dinner, the dormitory served saury, a seasonal speciality. Because I do not like fish, I had originally decided not to order dinner that day. Then I reconsidered: grilled saury is something I can actually tolerate. I might as well give it a chance.
With saury, I prefer the tail end. That way I do not reach the bitter part around the belly, and there are fewer bones.
Apart from salmon steaks, the number of times in my life that I have eaten an entire fish by myself could, without exaggeration, be counted on one finger.
Faced with a whole fish all on my own, I was suddenly overcome by a mournful little feeling: ah, I have grown up, and now I must teach myself, alone and unaided, how to eat an entire fish.
I tried opening it up and carefully removing the bones. I also diligently scraped away the dark innards around the belly that make the flesh taste bitter, all while worrying that my lack of skill might cause me to waste too much of the fish.
The saury was very salty and full of fine bones. On the positive side, it had very little fishy smell, so I managed to adapt to eating it quite well.
When I returned my empty tray, one of the women in the kitchen said to me, “You have a beautiful technique for eating fish.”
She then used her hands to imitate the way I had lifted the fish skeleton.
I thanked her while inwardly recoiling in alarm: was this the legendary covert-observation technique of the obasan?
She had clearly been busy working in the kitchen, yet she had still managed to observe, in secret, the way every single person ate?
Would the woman in the kitchen believe me if I told her that, as far back as I can remember, this was the first saury I had ever finished whole by myself?
But whether anyone would believe me or not, I could not say that sentence in Japanese anyway.
Ha ha.
A new skill unlocked in life.
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