Welcome to another edition of the Deskwarming Diaries, were an ALT suddenly found herself on a grand adventure with her lunch buddies. Today’s post features more mint snacks, a plastic bag, jinxes, superstitions, and rain women. Let’s jump in!
Today’s Lunch
Today’s lunch was a pizza stick and a bag of mint chocolate candies. These candies were kind of like Nestle Crunch bars but in stick form and with mint in the middle haha. They also didn’t melt in my hands, even though it was kinda hot outside.
I gotta say, I’m looking forward to kyūshoku (school lunch) starting again. Going to the konbini everyday was fun in the beginning, but now I’m tired of eating the same junk food all the time!
** Note on the lunch buddies
I talk about these teachers a lot, and I’m tired of being so vague all the time. I’m obviously not going to use their names, so this is how I’ll refer to them from now on (with a short self-intro for each!).
- Y-sensei: A female teacher who’s very good at English. She asks me questions on current events in America. She sits across from me.
- N-sensei: An older male teacher who’s very knowledgeable about Japanese culture. We often talk about shrines and temples. He sits next to Y-sensei.
- S-sensei: A female teacher who likes to practice English with me. She’s usually the one who decides the ‘Word of the Day’ (Deskwarming Diaries #12). She sits next to me.
The Plastic Bag
While we were eating, the wind was super strong, and it quickly swept a plastic bag out of Y-sensei’s hands! It was swept over the cliff and into the air, gently floating down to the sound of all of us exclaiming half-halfheartedly, until it finally landed in one of the flooded rice paddies below. “Well, we can’t just leave it there,” we all agreed, and decided to get it after cleaning time.
The Great Plastic Bag Adventure
Cleaning time had come and gone and we were all sitting at our desks when suddenly, Y-sensei stood up and said, “Ok, Jayelon. Let’s go get that bag.” I looked at her, surprised, then smiled and stood up; S-sensei chuckled. She offered to help, but she was in the middle of checking some students’ work, so Y-sensei told her to stay.
We headed out the back of the school and looked for things to get the plastic bag with — it had looked like it landed about three feet from the edge, and we didn’t want to have to step into the water and mud to get it. We settled on an short, iron gardening pole and an eight foot bamboo pole (just in case) and began our journey.
Carrying the bamboo pole over my shoulder, I seriously felt like I was going on an adventure; as I told Y-sensei, the only thing missing was a bag on the end of our poles, like in cartoons! She laughed and said that we had been transported into Momotaro.
Grinning and carrying on, we walked down, around, and into the rice paddies. There were farmers (and students) hard at work, planting tiny rice plants and driving machinery in the mud. They gave us strange looks as we walked past on the road, and I wondered what we must look like from their point of view, two females, one a foreigner, with poles, looking like they obviously didn’t belong. As we got closer, we saw a figure in the distance — N-sensei?!
It WAS N-sensei! Turns out he had gone down to get the bag before us and it had ended up drifing all the way to one side so a pole wasn’t needed! Y-sensei took it gratefully, then, smiling at me, tied it onto the end of her pole and held it on her shoulder.
“If you see a hearse go by…”
On our way back, I asked Y-sensei if the concept of jinx exists in Japan, like, “Wow, it’s such a nice day today, hopefully it doesn’t rain.” “Ahh! Don’t jinx it!” She thought about it for a while, then said she didn’t think so. When she asked N-sensei, the conversation turned into one about superstitions. For example…
- If a cat washes it’s face, it’ll rain the next day.
- If you see a swallow flying low, it’ll probably rain tomorrow.
- If you sneeze, someone is talking about you.
- If you see a hearse go by, you have to cover up your thumb. If you don’t your parents will die.
Well that escalated quickly. Where did that last one even come from? Turns out that in Japanese, thumb is 親指 (oya-yubi, lit. parent finger), so you cover it when a hearse goes by so they don’t die. Make more sense?
“Hopefully we’re not ame-onna“
Y-sensei said this after looking at the sky when we were walking down to get the bag. “What is ame-onna?'” I asked.
“Hmm… Like hare-onna or kumori-onna” she replied.
“Or yuki-onna?”
“Oh, no, yuki-onna is a yokai (demon). ame-onna is just a saying. So for example, if we are down by the rice fields and it suddenly starts raining, then we are ame-onna [lit. rain woman].”
“Ahhhh, ok, so like… It’s raining because we are rain women.”
“Yes, yes. You can say that with any type of weather. If you call someone a hare-otoko, then it’s like saying it’s sunny because the man you’re referring to is here.”
And then I remembered Juvia from the manga/anime Fairy Tail — she calls herself an ame-onna when she first appears because it rains wherever she goes; that line suddenly makes sense! I’m gonna have to start trying to use this in conversation haha.
