Mmm. Pies.

One feature of life as an ALT is that you receive constant requests to give presentations on cultural events in your home country. So far, I have given presentations about Christmas, Bonfire Night, Valentine’s Day and, bizarrely, Jewish immigration to East London.

It’s rare that you will have any choice in the topics. Schools are keen that their students should learn about life outside Japan and the presentations clearly play a helpful role in showing the kids that the world doesn’t end at the northernmost point of Hokkaido. The problem with these presentations though, is that it can be quite difficult to make the topics interesting for high school kids when teaching them in a foreign language. Also, it’s difficult to get beyond the surface of “Whoa-look how crazily different or weirdly similar our two countries are.”

Take Christmas, for example. In Japan, Christmas is celebrated solely as a consumer event. With a few exceptions, the fact that it is based on a religious premise is barely relevant to what people do on Christmas itself. Christmas day itself is not a national holiday and it mostly just consists of occasional presents to children and couples eating KFC bargain buckets. A good presentation about Christmas in the UK will cover, amongst other things, the fact that in the UK it’s a family event, that the country pretty much stops, the Christmas meal, Santa and the religious backstory.

All of the above makes for a pretty dull presentation that’s hard for the weaker kids to properly understand. With one exception. Any ALT will tell you that the primary goal in any presentation is to cause the kids to make the noise “eee?”. In Japanese, “eee?” basically means “What?!” or “I don’t understand.” I love it when I can get my class to say “eee?” loudly and in unison-"Eee?" is ALT-crack. If you can build at least three “eee?”s into a ten minute presentation then you have a hit on your hands. The easiest way to do this is to show the students pictures of food. Who would have thought we eat such large quantities of meat?! Aren’t fry ups disgusting?! What exactly is in black pudding?! All useful tools to have in your arsenal, yet all slightly clichéd, wacky views of life outside Japan.

"Eeee?!" guaranteed.

And the reality is that many people here have a fairly muddled sense of what life is like outside their home country. At JET orientation, one of the speakers said “The mere fact of your presence will contribute to internationalization in Japan.” At the time I thought “That sounds pleasingly effortless.” However, now I can see just how important it is. Merely meeting foreigners is a big deal for a lot of people here. I’m used to living in an international city and it can be shocking sometimes to hear Amsterdam described as “dangerous” by three separate people or to hear Chinese people constantly criticized for well, pretty much everything. These things are never done with any malice-it’s just that negative opinions about foreign countries are often presented as fact, rather than observation or discussion point.

I should add, that I’m not implying that race relations or cultural knowledge in the UK are in any way perfect. Obviously, they’re not.

But I think our presence really does have a positive impact. Much as cultural presentations bore me, I’m quite glad that a bunch of schoolkids now know about why lots of Jews moved to London and what a mince pie is. Just writing about this is making me crave mince pies. Mmmm. Pies.

Mmmm.