The 1:20 to 9 shift, Wednesday and Friday.
The Voice room is where students can come for general English conversation. Going in there at the beginning of the lesson period is a little like walking in to a party to which you aren't sure why you were invited, or, further, how any of the other people came to be there, either. There are low-level and high-level students, students who have lived abroad, students from our branch and students visiting from other branches. Today we had a guy visiting from Chiba city, and he stayed in the room for five hours, talking about his schizophrenic son escaping from the Tsudanuma "looney bin" and displaying his flawless use of English profanity. "It's fucking crazy!" he would occasionally say, or "Did your wife bitch to you about it?" I had to do the aural equivalent of a double-take every time he said something like that. Did he really use that so well, or did I just mishear? He was a professional cartoonist, and he ran away from his home in Osaka at age 16 to come to Tokyo and pursue his dream. And I suppose a small part of his dream involved being able to say "cunt" just like an American.
The other students in the room just looked at him with wide-eyed confusion. He was confounding them on purpose, seeing that they were low-level and then demanding that they justify why they liked a certain food or a certain place. Overseas travel and Japanese food are two good, unemotional stand-by topics we can always use in the Voice room (despite my love for a good debate, when a student asked me, "do you think Bush was involved in a conspiracy to plan September 11?" I would have given anything to be talking about the differences between soba noodles and ramen noodles). But this guy wouldn't even let the most banal of topics pass by without trying to start an argument.
When I'm assigned to Voice at the end of the day, I'll usually find myself sitting on the black vinyl couches of the conversation room with a few businessmen. They get off work around 6 or 7, maybe, and then sit in the Voice room until we close at 9. They like to talk about their families, usually, and I have to use all my will to keep from saying, "Wouldn't you rather be home with your family right now?" But that's not the way of the country. When I'm catching the 9:14 train to Nishi-Funabashi, the platform for the Sobu line wears its nightly uniform of black-suited, black-haired businessmen, and Anna and I, both of us with light hair and blue eyes, can't hope to throw it off. Earlier today I was thinking how Tokyo must be no place to live for a person who can't stand a little chaos, but then I realized that through all the brazen porn ads on the trains, the curiously Western-looking anime girls dancing on the sides of Shinjuku skyscrapers, and the indecipherable language, the people have created their own order through black suits, black overcoats, and sharply parted hair.
The other students in the room just looked at him with wide-eyed confusion. He was confounding them on purpose, seeing that they were low-level and then demanding that they justify why they liked a certain food or a certain place. Overseas travel and Japanese food are two good, unemotional stand-by topics we can always use in the Voice room (despite my love for a good debate, when a student asked me, "do you think Bush was involved in a conspiracy to plan September 11?" I would have given anything to be talking about the differences between soba noodles and ramen noodles). But this guy wouldn't even let the most banal of topics pass by without trying to start an argument.
When I'm assigned to Voice at the end of the day, I'll usually find myself sitting on the black vinyl couches of the conversation room with a few businessmen. They get off work around 6 or 7, maybe, and then sit in the Voice room until we close at 9. They like to talk about their families, usually, and I have to use all my will to keep from saying, "Wouldn't you rather be home with your family right now?" But that's not the way of the country. When I'm catching the 9:14 train to Nishi-Funabashi, the platform for the Sobu line wears its nightly uniform of black-suited, black-haired businessmen, and Anna and I, both of us with light hair and blue eyes, can't hope to throw it off. Earlier today I was thinking how Tokyo must be no place to live for a person who can't stand a little chaos, but then I realized that through all the brazen porn ads on the trains, the curiously Western-looking anime girls dancing on the sides of Shinjuku skyscrapers, and the indecipherable language, the people have created their own order through black suits, black overcoats, and sharply parted hair.