Dazaifu, Day 11 - Meeting with the PTA

Today’s activities are more like everyday school activities. I start the day by joining Principal Yagi at the front gate, where we greet students as they come into school. The principal says, “Ohayo gozaimasu,” I say, “Good morning,” and students respond as they walk by. There are quite a few who respond in English or in both languages, and these earn a broad smile from both of us – part of encouraging English conversation.

Mid-morning, the PTA mothers have a regular meeting. Nakagawa-san and I are both attending, I to be ‘officially’ introduced to the group (although I have already met quite a few of them during other activities), and Nakagawa to offer a report on his visit to my school and some of the tasks we hope to accomplish during my stay at Gakugyoin.

Nakagawa-san has a video prepared from the tapes that he and Ishii-san filmed during their visit, with Japanese voice-overs provided by Sasaki-san. It’s a fairly comprehensive look at our joint school visit in Washington, D.C., and the visits to the Fort Zumwalt schools as well as Jefferson Middle School in Saint Charles.

Then I spend some time trying to work on my computer. It has been ‘behaving badly’ for more than a few days; apparently I managed to corrupt something during a reinstall of the drivers for my video camera. I get necessary mail sent off, but have little or no luck getting to various websites. I think tonight is going to be a rebuild night; at least I’ve got the blank CDs to do backups.

This afternoon Ishii-san and I met with his elective science class to look over some BUGS collection sites. Most of these sites were used for the spring BUGS count, but we discover a problem at one of them; what had been a great high grass area has now been mowed down. (What is it about tall grass and people with cutting implements? We had the same problem in Missouri.) A new high grass site will be selected once the fall semester starts.

Then Ishii takes me on a short walk down the street from the school. We take a closer look at the site of the original Dazaifu city government offices and the original location of Gakugyoin School (both destroyed during the various invasions by Korean warriers during the latter part of the Nara period), and look at the temple for which this street is named, Kanzeonji shrine. This shrine has one of the three oldest bells still in general use in Japan; the bell is rung every year during traditional New Year's celebrations, and is one that 'ordinary people' are allowed to ring (rather than just the temple priests).

It's hot and steamy (we've finally had a bit of rain), so we head back for the comfort of the teachers' room at school (where the air conditioning is running at full tilt, thank goodness), and then home to my apartment.

(ADDENDUM - after an evening of backups, the machine is rebuilt. Not all files were successfully restored (notably e-mail and a couple of downloaded programs); I should be able to pick up most of the missing stuff from the home server at a later time. At least, it's not locking up every 10 minutes any more, so that is a distinct improvement on things.)