IES Introduction to Global Issues

2005-09-29T11:49:00.000+09:00

Hello World!

I have just started a new blog with my students here at the University of Calgary. I am now teaching for the LEAP program. That is the Learning English for Academic Purposes program (it's part of the faculty of education). It's a lot of fun, and my students are really great. If anyone is ever bored, they should have a look at my new blog and say hi to me and my students.

http://www.leapintoenglish.blogspot.com

Stay cool!

2005-05-23T14:57:00.000+09:00

These are some cigarette packages from

2005-05-16T15:10:00.000+09:00

This is a picture of Kansai Gaidai Campus

2005-04-05T16:54:00.000+09:00

Hello Everyone!!

Here is my new blog for my IES class:

www.gaidaiglobalissues.blogspot.com

Check it out if you are ever bored. I think I'm going to be blogging there for the rest of the semester. Please visit me and say hi!

2005-03-31T13:43:00.000+09:00

It's a long time since I have properly posted in here, but soon I am going to be in here all the time. Classes start soon! However, right now I am in Texas at a conference. I made my presentation about my students' blogs, and it was a lot of fun. I have met some really great people since I got here, and it has been quite inspiring hearing about all the work that teachers are doing all around the world. I went to two presentation about social justice, peace and global issues. There are a lot of classes doing stuff similar to what we are doing in Kansai Gaidai. I think there is hope for the world yet!

Anyway, I know I posted this poem about a year ago, but I thought I would put it up here again. It's the poem that I wrote about Jerusalem.

Jerusalem

I never asked to love you
With your stones soaked in blood
And fantastic dreams of peace
That can only cause war

If I had known
That your embrace
would have destroyed me
Perhaps I would have refused the bliss
That blinded my reality
Clouded my consciousness
With unrealized fantasies
Of temples and rocks

That mean everything
That mean nothing
That are now part of me
The part I cannot get rid of
The part that clogs my heart

With choked disappointments
That suffocate its beating
With exponential intensity
That increases with each torn body
The mangled wrecks of lives
Sacrificed again and again
On an alter of madness
To which you have compelled me to worship
With a greed that belies your beauty

The beauty that drew me in
And now will not let go
Until we are all destroyed
Or your promise comes true

by Scott Roy Douglas, 2001.

2005-03-27T14:18:00.000+09:00

here we go again

2005-02-07T07:05:00.001+09:00

Hello World!

I don't have any more classes until April, so I probably won't be blogging in this blog for a while. However, I am going to keep blogging in my other blog on a regular basis. Check out http://www.kansaigaidai.blogspot.com if you are bored and wondering what I am up to.

Enjoy the next couple of months, and see you back here in April 2005.

Peace and Love!

2005-02-07T07:05:00.000+09:00

2005-01-27T11:16:00.000+09:00

Here is one more thing that one of my students wrote:

The ability of guessing and thinking is my treasure I got in this class.

2005-01-27T10:26:00.000+09:00

I have just finished reading the final essays that my students wrote in class. I asked the students what they thought the most important thing was that they had learned in this course (An Introduction to Global Issues). Here are some quotes from their essays:

I could learn to be active in class was really important to improve my English skills.

. . . the most important thing is to think deeply and to put it into action.

. . . many ideas give me many choices, and I can choose the best one from them.

Putting ideas into action is important, as well as thinking deeply.

. . . the most important thing is that it is important to have a dream.

Talking of global issues, I learned a lot about them, and I realised that I did not know the world.

My way of thinking changed as I learned about global issues.

The most important thing that I learned in this course is that it is up to us whether the future is good or bad.

. . . I have an important role in the solutions and improvement of this situation (global issues).

I also learned the importance of having and telling my own ideas . . . so I could have the confidence to say my own ideas.

I feel that everyone can understand each other even if their mother tongues are different.

By taking this course, my way of thinking has changed. I have started to think about our earth more than before.

Knowledge is power.

We are living on the earth and issues are getting more international as this world is globalized, so it is neccesary for me to know what kinds of issues we are facing, the factors of the issues, the connection between our lives, and some solutions of the issues.

This course gave me both useful knowledge and useful English skills.

. . . the world's future will be great if human beings take action. On the other hand, the world's future will be terrible if no one does anything.

Before I took this course, I didn't think about what was going on in the world, what problems the world has seriously.

In Japanese classes, there are not many chances to think and talk with classmates about what we think. Through this course, I've learned thinking is importnat.

. . . I learned the importance of an active attitude toward English . . .

Before I did not have any knowledge about the world's problems, but now I often think about the world's problems not only in English, but also in Japanese.

This course helped me broaden my horizons.

When you, Scott, came to our group and asked something, somebodyin teh group had to say something or answer of course in English. However, one day, I noticed that a few of us spoke every time. On the other hand, most of us didn't speak in English at all. Instead of English, some of us spoke Japanese. Then, you can you guess what was a result of this trend? A few of us were able to talk and speak English much better than last year. Now, they can speak as fluently as English people. However, people who spoke Japanese could not improve their speaking ability. Maybe it was better than before, but not as great an improvement as people who spoke English a lot.

There were also a lot of other great ideas in the final essays. I wish I could share them all with the world. I am so happy that my students seem to have learned so much. I think they really "got it" and understand what I was trying to do in the class. I'd also like to thank my teacher at the University of Calgary, Dr. Hetty Roessingh for pointing me in the right direction, and teaching me how to teach. Her theory of "learning by design" really works!

2005-01-26T20:21:00.000+09:00

Thank you so much IES - E!! The year is finished, and now we are all going to be moving on to other things, but I will never forget any of you. It was simply a pleasure working with all of you for the past 10 months. I feel that I have also learned a lot from you guys. I was never your teacher, and you were never my students, instead we were partners working together to learn and grow. It was wonderful. I was so touched when I read the blog that you all made (http://www.scottisawesome.blogspot.com.) I can see that all the hard work that we have done in this past year has really been worth it. I will never forget what we have learned together, and don't forget - you can change the world!

2005-01-21T15:36:00.000+09:00

There are only two classes left. I can't believe it. It seems like just yesterday I was in a panic trying to think about what I would teach my IES class. The only think I knew was that I had to teach my class something in the social sciences. Now I'm glad that I choose to study global issues in my class, because I think I really learned a lot with my students. They may not know it, but usually I read the book the day before we talked about it in class!! However, I do have an advantage in that I never had any vocabulary problems :-) Anyway, now I feel really inspired about doing good things for the world. I can't wait to move back to Canada and get to work. I wonder what I will do first. I think I am going to keep blogging, so check back here to see what I am doing in the future.

However, I will be in Japan for the next six months, so you can read this blog to see what my new students are doing. I am teaching IES B next semester, and I am going to use the same textbook. It's going to be weird teaching new students.

Anyway, it was wonderful teaching all of my students this past year, and I hope they keep on blogging!

2005-01-20T11:03:00.000+09:00

Here is the IES Global Issues class. Can you believe we have been studying together for an entire year. I can't believe there are only four classes left!

2005-01-14T08:51:00.000+09:00

It’s amazing how fast this semester has gone by already. I can’t believe that this year is almost over. In one way, I’m glad because I am looking forward to a long holiday, but in another way, I’m sad because I have been teaching my IES class for almost a year and soon we won’t be seeing each other anymore. However, this is all part of the cycle of life, and it’s the way it should be.

We had a very interesting class the other day talking about metaphors for the future. We thought about the future being like a rollercoaster on a moonless night, a game of dice, a ship on the sea, and a blank piece of paper. I guess I kind of believe in the ship metaphor, in that I would like to think that we can have some influence on the future (like the captain of a ship deciding where he wants to go), but that we are also subject to outside forces beyond our control. You know, I used to think about fate and destiny a lot. I wonder if my students think about it. Although I like the ship metaphor for the future, I think at heart, I am really a fatalist in that I don’t think we do have much choice for our future, or if we do have a choice, it is very difficult to make certain choices in our lives. Let me try and explain this further:

What is mean is this – we are socialized to act in a certain way, and society around us expects us to act in certain ways. As a result, we usually act in the way that we are supposed to act in. All the choices I make in life are a result of my education and culture, and to go beyond that is very difficult. For example, I could choose to become a doctor or a teacher, but because of certain things that happened in my past I was propelled along the path of becoming a teacher, and it would have been very hard for me not to have become a teacher, and to have become a doctor instead. Everything in my past was propelling me into become a teacher, and it would have taken a huge effort to will not to be a teacher. Does that make any sense? It is almost like society controls our destinies, rather than ourselves, and society forces us to play certain pre-determined roles and it is almost impossible not to play the roles that society has decided for us. Another way to illustrate this might be the idea of marriage. All of society is constantly telling us that we need to find a partner, and that marriage and children are the highest ideal of happiness, but maybe for some people, this is not the way they could be most happy, but because society is pressuring them to get married, they get married anyway.

Hmmmm, I wonder if any of this is making any sense. I used to think about this a lot when I was younger (I am an old and cynical 34 now). I guess the biggest tragedy of this way of thinking is that I am aware of the fact that I have no real free will, but I am unable to do anything about it. I liken it to being in a straightjacket, with my legs free to roam. I can walk to where I want, but my arms aren’t free to do what I want.

Hoo whee, I hope my students aren’t reading this and getting depressed. Anyway, now that I am 34, I hope the ship metaphor is more apt than my straightjacket metaphor.

I am kind of a positive thinking nihilist. Is that an oxymoron?

2005-01-05T09:41:00.000+09:00

I'm just shocked by the disaster around the Indian Ocean. I have never heard of such a terrible natural disaster in my life. I was in Canada when it happened, and I couldn't believe what I was watching on TV. I'm back in Japan now, and I'm preparing for classes next week. I hope we can help somehow in our class. We'll have to put our heads together and try and think of some way we help the poor people who have been affected by this disaster.

On another note, I enjoyed seeing all my family in Canada. It was a nice 10 days, despite the cold weather. I don't think I am used to -20 degrees C anymore. Now I know why Canadians use so much of the world's energy. We heat our houses so much. My house in Canada is warmer than my house here in Japan. Also, in Canada, every room is heated 24 hours a day, even the rooms that don't have anyone in them. It seems like a terrible waste of energy, but then it is so easy to be selfish when it is so cold outside. Even now, here in Japan, I have all of my heaters burning full blast. I think I'll go and turn down some of my heaters now.

2004-12-14T13:20:00.000+09:00

I’m finally blogging! I have been dying to blog for the longest time now, but the Japanese Proficiency Test seemed to dominate my life for the longest time. Thank goodness that’s over with. Now I can think about other things (at least until I have to take level 3 next year!)

I think things are really going well in my global issues class. I think everything is finally coming together now. I think the most exciting thing is that whenever I watch the news are read the news on the internet, I can see things that we have been talking about in class. I feel that because of this course we can all understand what is going on in the world a lot better (me included!) For example, just the other day I read that over 1000 people are dying every month in the Congo because of the war that is going on there. It’s shocking to think that we are all living such safe lives here in Japan, but there are so many places in the world that are suffering so much.

We talked about Chanukah in class yesterday, and we were talking about the meaning of Chanukah. I think of the meanings of Chanukah is that we have to remember all the people who are suffering in the world. Just like the Jewish people suffered under the Greeks during the time of the Maccabbees, we have to remember all of the people who are suffering now. Until the whole world has peace, we have to keep lighting candles . . .

Anyway, there are only four and a half days until the winter holiday! Yahoo! I’m going to Canada. I hope it’s not too cold!

2004-11-28T17:56:00.000+09:00

Here is another disadvantage of using coal as an energy source: "Latest China Coal Mine Blast Traps 170 Miners"

I hope everyone in my IES class is having fun studying this weekend! I have been studying all weekend too. I only have one week left until my Japanese Proficiency Test. Man, it's difficult studying a foreign language. I think I appreciate my students a lot more because of this experience I am going through. Right now, I am in total despiration mode. I am trying to memorize lists of vocabulary words (something I ALWAYS tell my students NOT to do), and I have been doing lots of grammar exercises all week (another thing I would never recommend). I feel like I am breaking all the rules of studying a foreign language. However, all I want to do is pass this test. After I pass this test, then I'll worry about speaking Japanese. Now I understand what it is like to study for the TOEFL test. Gotta go and study! Later!

2004-11-19T13:07:00.000+09:00

Hello everyone! Right now, in my class we are talking about the energy crisis and alternative forms of energy, and I found this article about the train system in Calgary. The Calgary trains are now 100% emmissions free because the electricity used to power the trains is generated by wind mills in Southern Alberta. If you want to know more, check out this link:

http://www.calgarytransit.com/environment/ride_d_wind.html

I also found tons of other information about alternative energy, just by typing in "alternative energy" into yahoo.com. I feel pretty good that the trains in Calgary don't produce any CO2 and they aren't contributing to global warming.

On the other hand, as I sit here typing this blog, I guess I am contributing to global warming (or nuclear waste, I'm not sure where my electricity comes from in Hirakata City, but either way, it's bad). The reason I'm having an impact on the environment is that I put all my laundry into the dryer. I desperately need some clean clothes for this weekend, but my balcony is already filled with wet clothes that have been there for three days already. Each time they get a little bit dry, it starts to rain again and all my clothes get wet. Because of that, I had to use the dryer to dry my clothes. It's kind of frustrating, because I want to do my best for the environment, but then I keep having little setbacks like this. I wonder what the solution should be. Maybe I should buy more clothes. But then, that's a problem for me in Japan because I am so HUGE and the clothes here are so LITTLE. What to do?

2004-11-14T19:48:00.000+09:00

Congratulations to all my students who passed the studying abroad exams! You know, right now I am studying like crazy for the Japanese Proficiency Test (level 4 - the easiest) and I am having such a hard time. I am taking three Japanese lessons a week, and I still don't really seem to be making any progress. Anyway, my students are inspiring me, because they are all working so hard to learn English, so I want to work hard and study Japanese. Anyway, that's my 2 cents for today.

2004-11-03T14:44:00.000+09:00

Why are people voting for George Bush????????? I don't understand! Comments?

2004-10-29T13:32:00.000+09:00

Hmmmmmm, I’m not feeling very inspired about my blog today. I can’t really think of anything to say. I am hoping that by just starting writing, suddenly I will think of something to say . . .

Ah, I know. It is almost the Kansai Gaidai University Festival. There are going to be lots of booths selling different kinds of food, as well as music and dance demonstrations, art shows, etc. All kinds of stuff. I went to the Kansai Gaidai Festival last year as well, and one thing that I noticed that is different between Canada and Japan, is that in Canada the students seem to be much more political. However, this could be because I am not able to read or speak Japanese very well (okay, practically not at all), so perhaps I am just missing something, but it does seem that most of the stuff that goes on in the festival is not of an overt political nature. I remember in Canada, if a similar event were to take place, there would be all kinds of groups involved, such as Amnesty International, the youth organizations for different political parties (left wing and right wing as well as centre parties), organizations for Palestinian rights, pro-Israel organizations, groups of people protesting high tuition fees (which are a fraction of what they are in Japan anyway!), people promoting animal rights, gay rights, women’s rights, Kurdish rights, etc., groups for various religions: Christians, Muslims, Jews, Bahai, etc., groups running food banks in Calgary, groups raising money to help overseas children, groups protesting the American war in Iraq, other peace groups, and people handing out Marxist-Leninist pamphlets. In fact, I remember once there was even a group promoting the use of Esperanto as a world language, instead of English. Just about any kind of group would be represented, all actively promoting their own particular political agenda and opinions. It is this kind of “dialogue” that I don’t see at Kansai Gaidai. The students don’t seem to be very politically motivated in what they do. When I hear students chanting on campus and waving posters and signs, they are not protesting anything, just inviting people to take part in their club activities.

Anyway, I guess I thought of something to blog. I would be interested in people comments about the differences between Canadian campus culture and Japanese campus culture. Am I missing something?

Peace!

2004-10-17T21:44:00.000+09:00

Yuri and Motoko with their official Terry Fox Run Certificates

2004-10-17T21:42:00.000+09:00

Yuri and Motoko getting their certificates

2004-10-17T21:39:00.000+09:00

From left to right: Yuri, Motoko and Scott running across the finish line at the Terry Fox Run in Kobe Japan!

2004-10-16T20:41:00.000+09:00

Hello World!

Boy, do I ever have a splitting headache tonight. Earlier tonight, I felt as if my head was pounding, but now I am feeling a little bit better, so I thought I would write in my blog.

First of all, I just want to say:

HOORAY Yuri and Motoko!!!!

Yuri and Motoko came to the Terry Fox Run today. I was so happy to see them. I was worried that I wouldn’t see them because I was so late getting to the Terry Fox Run today. The Run was on Rokko Island, and I totally miscalculated the amount of time it would take to get to Rokko Island. I thought it would only take an hour, but it took two hours. Luckily, I found Yuri and Motoko at the race. I felt bad though, because I had said that I would sponsor them in the race, and I was so late, that I barely even had time to register myself. Luckily, however, I got to the race before it started. I really admire Yuri and Motoko for coming to the Terry Fox Race. It was really far away from Hirakata, and it isn’t easy to walk or run 5 km. While I was running around Rokko Island, I kept wondering when I would reach the end of the race, and I was only running 5 km. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to run 42 km every day, like Terry Fox did. I don’t think I would be able to do it. I think if I had cancer, I would probably just give up. I guess I am not much of a fighter, but I did manage to run the 5 km without stopping today. Yuri and Motoko came soon after my friend Taka and I crossed the finish line. It was fun cheering them across the finish line. I feel like we really accomplished something. Maybe I am a bit of a fighter.

Anyway, I just want to say HOORAY Yuri and Motoko one more time, and also I want to say HOORAY for Taka who was my only friend who would come to the race with me (don’t feel bad Janet, I know you had a meeting – Taka and I ran for you!)

2004-10-14T13:43:00.000+09:00

Here is a letter that I just wrote to the Terry Fox Foundation in Canada. My students have all written letters in reaction to Terry's Letter Seeking Support, and I thought Terry's parents might enjoy reading these letters.

October 14th, 2004.

Ms. Breeda McClew
International Director
The Terry Fox Foundation
Suite 802, 789 Don Mills Road,
Toronto, Ontario. M3C 1T5
Canada

Dear Ms. McClew,

I sent you an email a short while ago about a video file that was corrupted on your website. I wanted to thank you very much for getting this file fixed so quickly. The resources you have on your website are just wonderful, and my students have enjoyed using them to learn more about Terry Fox and the Marathon of Hope. One of the resources that I downloaded from your website was Terry’s letter seeking support. After reading this letter, my students all wrote letters in answer to Terry’s letter. I was so touched by these letters that I thought Terry’s parents might want to see them and know that his message is still spreading all around the world, even here in faraway Japan. Could you please pass these letters along to Terry’s parents? I think that my students have discovered a new hero that will continue to inspire them long into the future.

On a personal note, I am very happy to be able to share Terry’s story with my students at Kansai Gaidai University, and take part in the Terry Fox Run at the Canadian Academy in Kobe. Terry has always been a great inspiration to me and my family. In 1979, when I was a little boy, my mother was first diagnosed with cancer. The cancer had spread into her lymph system, and the doctors had told her to prepare for the worst. Depression and illness followed. The chemotherapy was almost worse than the cancer. My mother lost her hair, could no longer taste her food, and was desperately nauseous after her treatments. As my mother lay in hospital thinking she was going to die, suddenly there was this young man who was running across Canada on one leg. From her bed in a hospital in Calgary, my mother watched the news about Terry Fox and took hope. She fought back, and after eight years she won. My mother has now been in remission from cancer for 17 years. I am sure that one of the reasons my mother is still here today is because of what Terry did when he tried to run across Canada.

Keep up the good work!

Yours truly,

Scott Roy Douglas

2004-10-09T13:15:00.000+09:00

Right now my class is talking about Terry Fox and his Marathon of Hope. If anyone wants to know more about Terry, check out this link:

http://www.terryfoxrun.org

2004-10-09T13:07:00.000+09:00

The Terry Fox Run in Kobe is coming up fast. I wanted to go running this morning to practice, but it was raining so instead I made three pieces of toast and had a cup of coffee. Wow, I guess I am not a hero. It still amazes me that Terry ran a marathon every day on just one leg. I can’t even force myself to go for a walk in the rain sometimes. Right, I guess I will have to force myself to go out running this afternoon. The funny thing about running though, is that often I don’t want to do it, but as soon as I am doing it, I am really enjoying myself. I guess so many things in life are just like that. It is the initial effort that is the most difficult, and once you have begun something, then it can actually be great. It’s like that with writing essays too, now that I think of it. When I was a grad student, I could procrastinate for days before I finally settled down and started to get to work. It killed me just thinking about having to write a paper, but then, once I started my paper, it usually just started to flow. It’s just getting started that is the hardest thing.

Right, I am definitely going running this afternoon.

2004-09-03T13:49:00.000+09:00

Hi Guys!!

This isn't really about a global issue, but I thought I would share my trip to Mt. Fuji with everyone. It was quite an experience!

Climbing Mt. Fuji

Being a teacher, I had all of last August off, which meant that I stayed home most of the time and my sleep patterns became so totally skewed that I ended up working on my “projects” at odd hours of the night, and then proceeded to sleep throughout the day in the various rooms of my apartment. Worried that at the age of 34 this is not a good way to live and that my entire holiday was going to slip by before I did anything worthwhile, I forced my friend Taka to attempt to climb Mt. Fuji with me. Fools that we were, we planned an overnight ascent to the top so that we would arrive in time to watch the sun majestically arise over the far horizon, as suggested by a well known travel guide. After all, we were in the land of the rising sun. This was something we had to do at least once in our lives.

Wanting to take the shinkansen as well for the excitement and adventure, we arrived at the Shin-Fuji Bullet Train station at about 3:30 that afternoon, and then took the special bus to the “Fifth Station” of Fujinomia. We were going to climb up the Fujinomia side, which is the most convenient way to climb to the top coming from Osaka on the shinkansen.

At first, everything was delightful. As we alighted from the bus at the Fifth Station, we were greeted by crisp mountain air, and a temperature of about 20 degrees Celsius. I was home! It felt like summer in Alberta. My entire body was budding in happiness to have escaped from the insufferable polluted mugginess of urban Japan. I charged ahead with Taka trailing behind me. This is the life, I exclaimed, feeling as if I were a strange mixture of 19th Century British Explorer and rugged 21st Century outdoorsy type. Stopping only long enough to purchase sacred Shinto walking sticks, mine festooned with red ribbons and silver bells, Taka’s adorned with yellow ribbons and silver bells, we started to ascend the mountain to the jingling of bells and the thudding of our hearts.

Within twenty minutes we had reached the sixth station. I was ecstatic. I loved climbing in the mountains. Why, if I lived in the area, I would probably climb Mt. Fuji every weekend just for the exercise. There was also a cheery kind of camaraderie on the trail. We met some Canadians at the sixth station, and joked about how warm it was. We were the only people wearing t-shirts, the majority of Japanese around us in gortex outfits that probably would cost me a month’s wages. Taka and I approached an old lady inside a hut who sat on a raised tatami mat platform beside a charcoal hearth. Taka asked if we could get our sticks branded. The trick to the sacred walking sticks is that you are supposed to get them branded at each station as you climb up the mountain, culminating at the tenth station at the top. I watched in fascination, as a young man was called from somewhere in the depths of the mountain hut to pull out the brand from the charcoal fire and burn the symbol of the sixth station into our sticks. Then a bubbly young girl carrying a tray of porcelain cups approached us. With a deferential bow, she asked us if we would like to try some free mountain mushroom tea. Wow, this was Japan at it’s best! I told Taka two or three times that this was the real Japan, thereby unconsciously nullifying his own daily suburban existence as something other than Japanese. I sipped the tea, salt and earth dancing on my tongue. I felt as if I were tasting the history of the mountain. Ancient mysteries were conveying themselves to me through this liquid distillation of Fuji.

“It’s good,” said Taka.

“It’s like ambrosia from the ancient gods of Japan,” I replied, tending towards hyperbole due to my exuberant spirits. We were politely invited to buy some tea to take home from the little shop attached to the mountain hut. We were told we could only buy this tea from this hut. None of the other huts on the mountain had this tea. I imagined Japanese maidens gathering mushrooms in the mist and then drying them in the high mountain sun to make this delicately flavoured tea. The very essence of Fuji being captured by the mushrooms. I verbalized my thoughts to Taka. He told me they probably bought the tea in bulk from Tokyo to sell as souvenirs to tourists and that there were no mushrooms on Fuji because they couldn’t grow on the barren volcanic rocks. I marched on up the mountain, thinking the only reason I didn’t purchase any tea was because I didn’t want to burden my backpack with any extra weight.

We were walking up the Fujinomiya trail, the black rocks of Fuji on either side of us gradually becoming more and more devoid of any vegetation. Bit by bit, as the landscape around us completed its transformation into a barren sloping moonscape, it got darker and darker and colder and colder. Taka and I broke open our backpacks to put on the long sleeve shirts and sweatshirts we had brought with us. Each step up the mountain was now getting more difficult, and we were traveling more and more slowly. The arrival at each mountain hut was a cause for great celebration, but it was now night time, and we found the huts closed to us in the darkness. We couldn’t get our sacred sticks branded. No problem, however, I figured Taka and I would make it to the top in good time, and then we could find a nice cozy spot to sleep until the rising of the sun. We could always stop at each hut on the way down, having bowls of hearty udon noodles, and get our sticks branded then. We ate the peanuts and raisins we had brought along with us to give us energy.

However, it was now the middle of the night, and it was cold. We started up the path again, and I could hear Taka’s laboured breathing behind me. We stumbled over rocks and volcanic debris. Taka had taken out his flashlight and was trying to light up the way in front of me while maintaining his own balance on the trail. My sweat soaked cotton undershirt was chilled and clinging to my body. The path to the top of the mountain had now deteriorated from being a proper trail to being indistinguishable from the surrounding volcanic surface. A thin rope had been strung up erratically to guide people in folding switchbacks ever upwards up the side of the mountain, and from time to time I steadied myself using the rope, the rope sagging and dipping dangerously with my weight as I pulled myself up. We were moving much more slowly now with ever smaller footsteps towards our goal. Gradually, the minor ache I had begun to experience around my temples at the Eighth Station was turning into a splitting headache that thundered and blotted out rational thought. Any slight movement to my head started a pounding drum chorus in my brain accompanied by an irresistible urge to throw up all over the black porous rocks at the side of the trail. I stopped to turn around and look dizzily at Taka who was suffering from the exact same symptoms as me, only to have them exacerbated by my now moaning on about the book “Into Thin Air” and how all those people died on Mt. Everest because they foolishly pushed their way to the top when they should have just gone back down the mountain.

Stopping and looking at each other, we swayed amongst the rocks. What were we going to do? I looked up to see if I could see the top and suddenly I felt as if I were in Tibet. I had achieved a moment of clarity in which I could see my past lives. I had once been a monk. That is the only explanation for my ability to recognize what I had never seen. A Tibetan Buddhist monastery was perched on a cliff above us, looming in the darkness. “Look,” I said to Taka grasping his shoulder for balance and pointing reverently to the sky and the mountain. “It looks like a Buddhist monastery.” I gasped out a choked whisper between heavy breaths. “If we can get there, we’re saved.” Through the deep purple of the night, I could made out a wooden deck that had been adorned with prayer flags.

With renewed strength and determination we soldiered on until we made it to what turned out not to be a Tibetan Monastery, but the “Ninth Station”: a mountain hut for branding sticks and serving instant noodles. There were no prayer flags. However, it still felt like salvation. It was around one o’clock in the morning and according to a tourist pamphlet I had stuffed into my backpack, we were only an hour away from the top. Nonetheless, I had to stop and rest. Even slight movement made me feel as if I was about to puke out my guts. Waves of nausea racked my body, and memories of the worst hangovers in my past resurfaced in my consciousness as jugs of cheap Italian wine quaffed in college danced about in my head getting a belated revenge.

We decided to try and sleep a little bit before making the final agonizing decision to go up or down the mountain. However, the quaint mountain hut at the ninth station was barricaded and silent against our entreaties to enter at that late hour. Our salvation melted into a false promise of rest and comfort. Turning dejectedly from this mountain fortress, I thought of Joseph, Mary and the Baby Jesus, as we looked for somewhere sheltered from the wind. We ended up collapsing beside a oddly shaped boulder onto some lumpy volcanic rock off to the side of the trail, huddled together like two hobbits about to descend into Mordor. I started shivering uncontrollably. I had never shivered like that before in my life. It started with an uncontrollable vibration in my right leg, and then spread to my torso and chest before shaking my head and dissipating into a brief moment of calm before traveling up my body once again. I tried to huddle closer to Taka, but succeeded only in causing his body to vibrate from the cold in harmony with mine. In addition to the extreme altitude sickness both Taka and I were suffering from, it was also about 7 degrees Celsius. Seven degrees, you scoff. Yeah, well try seven degrees 3,400 meters above sea level when you are gasping and wheezing for oxygen like an emphysema patient smoking a cigar. We were cold. Naturally, we were woefully unprepared for the cold, because I had ripped the extra sweaters out from our back packs back in the 34 degree heat of Osaka, telling Taka that I was “Canadian” and didn’t need no sissy extra sweaters for any temperature above freezing. I thought I was so smart, making our back packs lighter and easier to carry. Taka, bless him, never did throw my foolish actions back into my face, and just shivered and suffered silently beside me acting as Samwise to my Frodo.

After fifteen minutes of violent shaking that likes of which I had never experienced in my life, it was no good, we were too cold. We couldn’t sleep. We were going to die. We had to keep moving. We stood up. We sat back down. We narrowly avoided puking. We stoop up again, clutching each other and our ceremonial walking sticks outfitted with the ribbons and Shinto bells. I swayed with dizziness. Grabbing Taka with both hands, my stick digging into him, I asked him if he felt well enough to continue to the top, praying that he would say he felt too sick to go on. His answer was that if I wanted to keep going, he would follow me. Damn, the responsibility was mine. The image of money flashed through my throbbing brain. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it didn’t cost us a total of $500 CND in train tickets to get to the bloody mountain in the first place. Then I thought, money pales in comparison to the importance of being able to live to tell the tale about this sad attempt on Mt. Fuji. I could warn others to bring extra sweaters, and therefore do something good in this world. But it was almost $500. I already told everyone I knew I was going to climb Mt. Fuji. I had even scoffed at one of my fellow teachers from Australia who didn’t make it to the top, subtly mocking her weakness and lack of will while humbly giving out the impression that I was a paragon of steadfast mountaineering manhood having had the experience of living beside the Canadian Rocky Mountains. I would never give up. That was the impression I was sure everyone had of me. Trying to get the better of the pounding in my head, and suppressing the dancing fantasies of letting my guts spill out in vomit at the side of the trail, I started to trudge as pathetically as I could up the 45 degree incline that made its jagged way to the top. Taka staggered forward and grabbed my arm. I swayed. “No, no, I’m okay” I said, holding my sacred Shinto climbing stick as if it were a crucifix. “We will regret it if we don’t make it to the top,” and pushing aside his arm, I turned once more to the summit.

“Let’s go back down Scott. I’m worried about you. I also feel sick.”

I wobbled and hesitated. “Well, if you feel sick . . .” I peered through the darkness at Taka’s face, raising my Shinto staff and half pointing it at him. “How sick do you feel?”

“Sick”

Little red demons danced a jig in beat with the pounding of my headache. Here was a reprieve. My agonized brain told me we were merely going back down because Taka felt sick. I couldn’t let Taka feel sick now, could I? I had to help him down the mountain. The unwritten rules of friendship demanded it. “Okay, let’s go down,” I replied with alacrity, impressing myself with my ability to make split second decisions like a true leader. I teetered briefly on one foot and then turned and began to stumble downwards through the darkness with Taka. We had started climbing that evening at about 5:30 pm, it was now past 1:30 in the morning. We were nauseous. We were exhausted. We were in pain from climbing. Down, down, down, we went back down the mountain, the tiny beam of light from Taka’s flashlight leading the way, lighting up the moonscape in front of us, the beam stopping now and then to warn me of particularly tricky pitfalls in the trail. Going down was interminable. I felt so sick, and the sickness was mixed with a rising and falling humiliation that wrenched at my soul. Stumbling through the darkness, seeing nothing except the sharp rocks lit up by the tiny circle of light that surrounded our feet, I was attempting to convince myself the that trip had been worth it. I was failing, but agony, exhaustion and pain were enough to rise up to blot out the failure and compel me to continue towards a lower elevation. Every once and a while, overcome by fatigue, we would go off the path to try and sleep, huddled amongst the rocks and primordial volcanic boulders, but the cold made it impossible, and we would get up once again, stiff and sore to begin once more our defeated descent to safety.

After going down about a thousand meters, we started to feel better. It was a bit warmer outside. My head had stopped pounding, and the overwhelming urge to throw up had settled into a slight nausea and regret for eating so many peanuts on the way up. I burped loudly into the night and could taste mushroom tea. We shuffled once more off the path tripping over rocks and sliding through the sand, looking for somewhere relatively smooth to rest. We lay down, and I took a plastic raincoat out of my backpack and spread it over my body to retain some heat. We fell asleep. It must have been about three am.

Suddenly I heard a scream. A blood curdling banshee of a scream. Had we somehow offended the female deity said to live in the volcano? My eyes opened and in the purple light of the darkness I could just make out the figure of a woman or a girl a stone’s throw away on the path.

“Who’s there?” she asked in English, her voice cracking with fear. I was surprised, I remained lying where I was, my head turned towards her, and answered back “two people”.

“You scared me,” she said accusingly. Her accent was odd, but not Japanese.

“You scared me,” I retorted.

“Do you know how far it is to the top?” She asked.

“About four hours.” I responded, though in reality I had no idea. My eyes strained to see her in the darkness. She didn’t have a flashlight, and was making her way up the mountain by the light of the half moon that gleamed in the far night sky.

“Okay, thanks,” and she continued her solitary climb.

I watched her for a moment pick her way up slowly in the darkness, sending showers of small rocks and debris behind her, and then fell back asleep and dreamed of fairies and demons.

Taka poked me. “Are you sleeping?”

“No”

“Who were you talking to before?”

“I don’t know. Weird eh?” I looked up at the sky. An alien array of stars covered the vast profusion above me.

“The stars are different in Japan,” I told Taka. He looked up.

“Look a falling star, did you see it? Did you see it?” He cried, suddenly animated.

“Where?” I asked, my head moving back and forth scanning the sky.

“There’s another one!” Taka’s arm pointed up from where we were lying.

“Where? Where?”

“Ah, look!”

“Ah!”

We both saw one. We lay in silence looking up at the night sky, a bright half moon in the east.

After a moment contemplating all this beauty, Taka said, “I’m cold.”

I told Taka about Leonard Bast and the book Howard’s End and how this character went walking in the woods to see the sunrise in the morning mist just like he had read in a poem. He was a working class fellow who was a clerk in an insurance firm, and two upper class sisters who had befriended him had asked him if it was marvelous, but he had replied that it had just been cold. Taka didn’t really get what I was talking about and looked at me quizzically in the same way a Labrador retriever might look at an old granny had she stopped to have a conversation with him about the political situation in India.

“Okay, let’s keep moving,” I sighed, and once more I felt like we were Frodo and Samwise as we got our aching bodies off the ground, my hands moving one above the other up my sacred stick to help me. We stood for a moment to get our bearings, and looked for the path. Taka’s flashlight made a wandering lonely yellow dot on the black rock around us. It all looked the same. I knew it had to be close, but we just couldn’t find it. We risked falling into a ravine or something worse, but downwards we continued, Taka tripping and staggering before me, the muscles in my legs crying out in silent protest with each step as I promised myself to be nicer to Taka after this trip. We had been hiking now for over 10 hours. Taka’s flashlight was beginning to scan the moon like surface of Fuji in a panicked dance across the rocks, but still we tripped and stumbled. But as we tripped and stumbled, with each step I felt less sick and the headache became no more than a memory. I was half tempted to turn around and go back towards the summit, but I knew that my legs would never carry me another step upwards.

Predawn was now coming to the mountain, the sky to the left of us gradually becoming a lighter shade of purple, that shadowless time of the night when we no longer needed the flashlight. Taka turned it off and stopped to get me to put it into his backpack as he stood there and contemplated the diminishing night sky and fading stars. Soon we found a side trail leading off from where we were scrambling down the mountain. We took it and hiked on the mountain side trail towards the east, my legs grateful to be walking on relatively flat ground. We were now marching towards the dawn, at least we would still see the rising sun of Japan! We walked with renewed vigour, Taka’s sacred Shino bells ringing each time he thrust his wooden walking stick into the ground. My sacred stick was silent. I had lost my bells somewhere on the side of the mountain when I had fallen and used it to stop me from being lacerated by the razor sharp volcanic rock. Now my red ribbons hung limp and frayed against the wood surface of my stick. Nevertheless, after about ten minutes we came across a likely hillock that we could sit upon and wait for the rising sun. We faced the direction that we felt was east. Gradually it got lighter. I heard birds. It got still lighter. My heart thumped in anticipation watching the deep purple of the night turn into the pale blue of the dawn, the stars disappearing from the sky. This must be the moment, the horizon was now turning white. I heard more birds. And then it was really, really light, high wisps of white cloud above us in the sky. It was day. Hey, where was the sun? We realized that it had already risen around the curve of the mountain. We missed it! All that hiking, and well, there we were sitting in a big shadow, we had just watched the sky get light because we were on the wrong side of the mountain. I looked at Taka, he looked at me. We struggled to hide the disappointment in our faces. We uncrossed our aching legs to get up and continue down the mountain, but just as we got up and turned to take the side trail to where we could go back down, Taka said,

“Look!”

“What?” I saw nothing. I was exhausted and semi-delirious with fatigue.

“Look, it is the shadow of Fuji!” and he was right. There, etched on the hazy blue sky, whispering clouds and mist in front of us was a perfect cone. It was the dark shadow of Mt. Fuji appearing in front of us, suspended in space, a spirit twin to the solid mountain on which we found ourselves so early that morning. For two seconds I said nothing, drinking in this amazing sight. I reached to pull the camera out from the front pocket of my backpack. I took a picture. Taka took a picture with the same camera. Putting our heads together we compared pictures in the screen of the green digital camera we had brought along. And then we continued on to find the trail to the bottom.

Scott Roy Douglas
Hirakata City, August 20, 2004

2004-07-06T12:21:00.000+09:00

Don't forget to vote!

There's an election in Japan on July 11th. I wonder if any of my students are going to vote. I know the voting age is 20 in Japan, so I am sure that some of my students are eligible to vote. It will be interesting for me to see who voted. I mean, here we are studying global issues, and one of the ways people can have an impact on the world is by voting. We are lucky that we live in democratic countries and we are able to vote. I am very dissapointed in myself because I didn't get organized enough to vote in the last Canadian election. One of the reasons I feel homesick is because I cannot take part in the political life of Japan. I really feel like an outsider here. However, my students are all Japanese citizens, and they can make a difference. I wonder if they realise this . . .

2004-06-29T17:13:00.000+09:00

Now is the busy time at Kansai Gaidai! I can’t believe that the semester is almost over, and we still have so much to do. However, it has been a really exciting semester, and my students and I all got to think about a lot of really important things.

One thing that I have been thinking a lot about lately is democracy. Today was the day for the Federal Election in Canada. I didn’t get myself organized in time, so I wasn’t able to vote in this election because I am living overseas. However, I should have voted. I feel awful that I didn’t vote, because everyone should vote. Democracy can’t work if people don’t vote. Also, this was a very important election for the Canadian people. There was a serious danger that the Conservative Party might win and form the government. That would just be one of the worst things that could happen for Canada. The Conservatives are a right wing party, and they would most likely do many things that are fundamentally opposed to everything that I believe in. For example, the Conservatives would have moved Canada closer to the United States in both economic and military issues, they would have allowed for private health care (in Canada, private health care is illegal), they would have increased military spending, and they would have infringed upon bilingualism, women’s issues, and minority rights – and that is just the beginning!!! It was a very scary scenario.

Luckily, the Conservatives didn’t win. My party didn’t win either (I support the New Democratic Party – they are a left wing party). The party that got the most seats in the House of Commons was the Liberal Party. They are a centre party. However, the Liberals didn’t get enough seats to form a majority in parliament. That means that they have to form a Minority Government with the support of the New Democrats. That is good news for me because it means that the party that I support is going to be very influential in the new parliament. If the Liberals don’t get the support of my party, they government could fall, and they would have to call another election.

Despite the Liberals forming a minority government with the support of the New Democrats, it was very close. I really wish I had been in Canada, or that I had gotten organized soon enough to cast an overseas ballot. It is so important that people get involved in the political process. Soon all of my students are going to be 20 years old. I certainly hope that they exercise their democratic rights and vote. Just think of all the countries where there is no democracy, and people are not able to choose their governments. Don’t take your freedom for granted!!

Love and Peace,

Scott

2004-06-23T14:19:00.000+09:00

I just finished evaluating the poster presentations for our Global Issues class, and I just want to say that all of the posters were absolutely fantastic. I have put all of the posters up in my office, and I invite everyone to come and see them when they have free time. They are really wonderful and worthwhile seeing. Quite a few of my fellow teachers have come into my office to have a look, and they are just blown away by how great they are. I am really proud of my class!! Even better than the posters, everyone was using such good English during the presentations. I couldn’t believe it. It was better than my wildest dreams. In fact, it was a little bit weird. I mean, suddenly my class was chatting away in English with no problems whatsoever. They were talking completely naturally. Even better, then were doing more than just talking, they were communicating. Amazing. It was just like they had all taken “English Pills” before the class. Now if I could just take the poster presentation class and bottle it and sell it to other teachers, I would be rich! Of course, if I become rich, being the global issues teacher that I am, I would donate most of the profits to charity :-)

Keep up the good work IES E!

2004-06-17T14:07:00.000+09:00

Here is a poem that I just found on the internet by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, one of my favourite Russian poets:

When One Person Reaches Out with Love

In ’41 Mama took me back to Moscow. There I saw our enemies for the first time. If my memory is right, nearly 20,000 German war prisoners were to be marched in a single column through the streets of Moscow.

The pavements swarmed with onlookers, cordoned off by soldiers and police.

The crowd was mostly women - Russian women with hands roughened by hard work, lips untouched by lipstick and with thin, hunched shoulders which had borne half of the burden of the war. Every one of them must have had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans.

They gazed with hatred in the direction from which the column was to appear.

At last they saw it.

The generals marched at the head, massive chins stuck out, lips folded disdainfully, their whole demeanor meant to show superiority over their plebeian victors.

"They smell of eau-de-cologne, the bastards," someone in the crowd said with hatred.

The women were clenching their fists. The soldiers and policemen had all they could do to hold them back.

All at once something happened to them.

They saw German soldiers, thin, unshaven, wearing dirty, bloodstained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulders of their comrades; the soldiers walked with their heads down.

The street became dead silent - the only sound was the shuffling of boots and the thumping of crutches.

Then I saw an elderly woman in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman's shoulder, saying: "Let me through." There must have been something abut her that made him step aside.

She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a colored handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of a soldier, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. And now suddenly from every side women were running towards the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had.

The soldiers were no longer enemies.

They were people.

2004-06-14T11:26:00.000+09:00

http://www.grameen-info.org/index.html

That's the website for the Grameen Bank that we are going to be reading about this week. Check it out to learn more about development in Bangladesh.

2004-06-10T21:21:00.000+09:00

Please add comments to by blog by clicking on the comments button :-)

2004-06-09T14:22:00.000+09:00

Wow, it seems like I have been blogging a lot lately. Actually, it is kind of fun blogging. It is a kind of record of my life and what I have been thinking. Anyway, I have been thinking a lot about my IES class lately, and how I can improve upon my teaching. When I was looking over the feedback sheets again the other day, I noticed that a lot of students said that we could improve the class if we all spoke more English, gave our opinions more often, and if we all asked more questions in class. Hmmmmmmmmm, how do we do that? My first reaction is to think “well, just bloody well do it! It’s up to you! Good God people, just SPEAK!” However, I realize that that kind of reaction is not necessarily the best reaction, because I am sure that if my students could do it, they would do it. So, the question is, how can I create an environment in my classroom in which the students feel they are able to speak English, share their opinions, and ask questions freely. I mean, why don’t they just do it? I wonder if it is because my students are missing many of the little “pieces” of language that are so important in daily conversation. My students all have excellent vocabulary and grammar skills, but they seem to struggle with communication. Something is holding them back. Perhaps it is these little “pieces of language”. Anyway, I am going to start teaching more of these little “pieces of language” to help the students to communicate with each other in a natural way. Naturally, it is also up the students as well to make an effort to only speak English. After all, I can jump around and dance in front of the classroom for hours on end, but I can’t make the students speak. As we say in English “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” In the end, it is ultimately up to them as to whether or not they wish to actively learn English

I have also noticed that many of my Japanese students seem to be obsessed with finding the “right answer”. Many students in all of my classes want to know when they have the wrong answer. Well, in my academic background (social sciences) no answers are wrong if you can support what you have to say in a logical way (that is why we are learning to write good essays). If you can argue that black is actually white, then you are on your way to being a successful university student. I don’t know if this is a good thing, but that is the way it is in my academic culture. I come from an academic culture where there are no absolutes. Nothing is completely wrong or completely right. I think D.H. Lawrence exemplifies this belief in the following quote from his book Why the Novel Matters:

We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and forever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute. There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute.

So you see, in my background nothing is right. I guess that is why I praise the students whenever they give me any answer – especially if they can provide some support to their answers. Now, I don’t know if this is a healthy way to think or not. I mean, if I could be more certain about a few things, then maybe I could be a lot happier.

Another comment that I received from one of my students was concerning the use of unfamiliar and difficult words. I agree, unfamiliar and difficult words can be more suitable for what you may want to describe, but if you are trying to communicate with someone, then you need to be prepared to explain what that word means or you will have failed in your attempt to communicate. I want real communication to take place in the classroom. It is through this communication with each other that I hope we will be able to learn. Thus, it is okay to you any word that a student thinks is appropriate, but that student must also take the time out to explain the words that he or she is using so that communicate may take place. I guess this brings me back to the idea I was talking about before with the “little pieces of language”. If you are going to use unfamiliar or difficult words, you need to check the comprehension of the person that you are talking to so that you can be sure that they understand what you are saying. On the other hand, it is also the responsibility of the listener to stop someone when they hear a word they don’t understand and to ask for an explanation. I will give my students some “little pieces of language” to help them do that.

Additionally, if you stop and search for the perfect word and now there is an uncomfortable silence in the conversation – you have failed in your attempt at communication because silence carries a negative message. It is better to use the words you know to describe or approximate what you want to say than to fail in your attempt at communication. A large vocabulary alone is not enough to make a good English speaker. Efforts to increase your vocabulary must go hand in hand with efforts to communicate fluently with your listener.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I hope this all makes sense! Remember, if you don’t understand something in my blog – email me!

Peace and Love!

Scott

2004-06-08T21:07:00.000+09:00

You know, it’s funny, but I don’t really feel like blogging at all tonight. Every class I tell my students “blog!! You’ve gotta blog!!! Everyone blog, blog, blog!!!!!” However, I do realise that it is almost impossible to pour your soul out onto the computer screen if you are not feeling motivated, or moved, or inspired, or even just plain old awake. This is especially difficult for me. I always think that everything I write needs to be a great masterpiece worthy of posterity, so if I can’t produce something sublime, I almost don’t want to produce anything at all.

Hmmm, what kinds of profound insight can I offer up to the people reading my blog tonight. I guess I could admit to an environmental failure. Remember how I was collecting all my old milk cartons and orange juice cartons under my sink so that I could go and recycle them? Well, I finally couldn’t fit any more milk or juice cartons under my sink, so I decided it was time to cut them up, flatten them out, and take them to the recycling bin at Izumia (big grocery store). I knew it was time because there was also a bit of a funny smell coming from underneath my sink. Anyway, I sat down in front of my sink, armed with a pair of scissors and the self-righteous feeling that can only come to a teacher of global issues when he is about to do something that he tells everyone else they should be doing. I started to cut up my first juice carton. It was a bit stinky. It was also filled with green mold. Eeeeew. That one went into my garbage. Oh well, I figured I could still recycle the rest. They couldn’t all be that bad. I thought I would try a milk carton next. Stinky too. Filled with even more mold. This time the mold was more black than green. I tried again. Mold. Again. Mold. Another carton. More mold!!! Now that I had disturbed all of the cartons that were living under my sink, the smell of mold was almost overpowering! I couldn’t breath. There were now moldy milk and juice cartons all over the floor of my kitchen. All of my cartons I wanted to recycle were moldy! Then I started to remember a show I saw on television about how an entire family had gotten sick from poisonous black mold, and then their baby died! I didn’t know what to do. I ended up wrapping a towel around my face so that I could stand the smell, and I squished all the cartons and stuffed them into a garbage bag. Yes, that’s right . . . four months of attempted recycling were all put into the garbage. I am a recycling failure. I am so depressed. However, I have learned one lesson. Always wash out your cartons before you put them under the sink for recycling.

Sigh.

2004-06-04T14:06:00.000+09:00

The Japan International Cooperation Agency. Check out what Japan is doing in terms of development:

http://www.jica.go.jp/english/

2004-06-04T11:34:00.000+09:00

Hi guys, don't forget about the CIA World Factbook. It is a good place to get information for your projects.

CIA World Factbook

2004-06-01T17:20:00.000+09:00

Hello to all my wonderful students (and the terrible ones too - ha ha ha)! Soon we are going to be doing a project on different third world (developing) nations. Here is a cool website with some info.

http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/third_world_countries.htm

later, my friend Janet is here.

bye

2004-05-31T22:05:00.000+09:00

I’m not sure if this exactly fits in with our theme of global issues or not, but I am still absolutely astounded by all the people I see when I go to Osaka. I mean, there are people everywhere. I have never seen anything like it in my entire life. Maybe the sheer numbers of people are almost like the crowds you can find in a suburban Canadian Mall on Boxing Day, but even on Boxing Day in Canada I don’t feel the same soul crushing anonymity I feel when I am surrounded by thousands of people I don’t know as I ride the escalator underneath the giant fiberglass whale in HEP Five. I wonder if my Japanese students feel the same oppressiveness that I feel in these huge crowds, or maybe they are used to it. After all, I am the foreigner, and I come from one of the least densely populated countries on the planet. It is obvious that I am going to be affected in some way by the huge numbers of people all over the place, but still I can’t help but wonder if my students sometimes feel lost as well when they are surrounded by so many people they don’t know.

I just finished reading a short story by Haruki Murakami. It is called “The Window”, but I am not sure of the Japanese title. It left me feeling incredibly sad and empty. It is about this guy who has a part-time job in a company called “The Pen Society”. People joined this society to learn how to write better letters. The guy in the story would answer letters that people wrote, and give them corrections, comments and guidance on how to write better letters. The thing is that all the people who wrote letters to this society actually probably didn’t really need to learn how to write better letters. They were lonely, and they had no one to actually write to. That seems so sad. I mean, here we are in one of the most crowded places on the planet, and there are people that are so lonely that they have to join a letter writing school to find someone to connect with. I wonder how people can live in such huge crowds, but not really know anyone. I also wonder if that isn’t the reason that some people actually join English conversation schools like Nova or ECC. It has nothing to do with learning English, and everything to do with the fact that they don’t know how to meet people or connect with anyone around them. Suddenly, by joining a school they can belong to something and connect to someone, even in a small way.

Anyway, is this sense of alienation that people suffer from in modern society a global issue? I’m not sure, but I do feel that it dehumanizes us all just a little bit. There must be better ways to connect with people than joining letter writing societies. The question is how do we connect. The point is we must. It is what makes us human. As E.M. Forster said “only connect!” Human relationships are what are most important. Hmmmmmm, maybe if we can get rid of the sense of dehumanization, we can start to empathize more with our fellow humans. By empathizing with others, perhaps we can escape the sense of alienation so that we can start to think beyond ourselves . . . . who knows?

That’s enough! So long for now . . . .

2004-05-25T12:14:00.000+09:00

I mentioned the issue of child labour in class the other day. Here are some articles that I read about this issue:

Gap Reports Labor Violations at Factories

Gap Reports Worldwide Labor Violations

2004-05-25T11:15:00.000+09:00

This is the last week we are going to be concentrating on peace and conflict issues, so I thought instead of writing a normal blog, I would let you guys read a poem that I wrote when I lived in Israel. I think many of you are confused by the Arab Israeli conflict. It is very difficult to understand. I don't understand it all all, even myself. I hope this poem will help you to understand some of the emotions people feel when they are in Jerusalem. If you have any questions about the poem, please don't be shy - you can email me!

Jerusalem

I never asked to love you
With your stones soaked in blood
And fantastic dreams of peace
That can only cause war

If I had known
That your embrace
would have destroyed me
Perhaps I would have refused the bliss
That blinded my reality
Clouded my consciousness
With unrealized fantasies
Of temples and rocks

That mean everything
That mean nothing
That are now part of me
The part I cannot get rid of
The part that clogs my heart

With choked disappointments
That suffocate its beating
With exponential intensity
That increases with each torn body
The mangled wrecks of lives
Sacrificed again and again
On an alter of madness
To which you have compelled me to worship
With a greed that belies your beauty

The beauty that drew me in
And now will not let go
Until we are all destroyed
Or your promise comes true

by Scott Douglas, 2001.

2004-05-11T18:42:00.000+09:00

I just finished helping one of the groups in my class get ready for their presentation about the Israel-Palestine conflict. They are doing a really good job out of making sense of this complicated issue. I guess it’s because I was just helping some students attempt to understand the situation in Israel, that I feel like writing about Israel again in my blog.

While I was living in Jerusalem in 1999, I was a bartender at a cool little pub called “Strudel”. As a bartender at Strudel, I met a lot of people. This especially helped me when I found out that I had to move out of my apartment in the German Colony area of Jerusalem. I didn’t know where to go, and soon I was going to be homeless. Luckily one of the customers in the pub had a really big two bedroom apartment that he lived in alone. He heard about my problem, and he told me that I could stay with him for as long as I needed to. I felt very grateful that my friend could help me out, but there was only one problem, he lived way in the northern part of Jerusalem in an Arab village called Shu’afat. However, I decided that a place to stay is a place to stay, and I moved in with my friend.

Shu’afat is north of Jerusalem, and it took me about an hour to walk to work. There were no direct busses from Shu’afat to the pub where I was a bartender; however, I could walk through the village first to get into a Jewish part of the city, and then take a bus. It was a hot and dusty walk to the bus, but I didn’t complain seeing as I was living with my friend for free.

Anyway, one day, I was walking through the village to catch the bus and there were two little girls with walking ahead of me on the road. They must have been about 10 or 11 years old, and at that age when little girls have an intimate best friend with whom they share all their secrets. They were walking slowly, arm in arm. As they walked, their heads were bent closely to one another, and their shiny black hair fell forward to cover their faces. You could see they were chatting about all the things that must seem so important to little girls all over the world. As they were chatting and walking they would giggle from time to time, and they were wandering slowly from one side of the road to the other as they moved they way forward, dust rising with their soft footsteps. I was walking quickly up behind them. They must have heard my heavy footsteps because they looked behind them, saw me, and started to giggle. I could hear the soft Arab lilt of their speech as they began to whisper together in earnest. I must have been a sight that they didn’t often see in that Arab village. A big tall guy with sandy blond hair, light skin and green eyes.

They started to walk even more slowly as they became more and more involved in their animated conversation. I soon overtook them. Once I was a little bit ahead of them, I suddenly heard a tiny little voice squeak from behind me.

“Shalom.”

At first I didn’t really believe my ears, and I walked on a couple of more steps.

“Shalom. Shaaaaaalom.”

It was one of the little girls. She gave the word shalom a high pitched musical quality. She was saying hello to me in Hebrew. Hello in Hebrew is the same word as the word for peace. I was a bit surprised that they were speaking to me, and I stopped a second and turned around, mustering as big a smile as I could. “Hello,” I said in English. They didn’t say anything, but they smiled back at me. I turned around and kept walking to the bus, feeling strangely hopeful because a little girl said hello to me in Hebrew.

2004-05-05T21:45:00.000+09:00

I was walking to the Keihan Station the other day in Hirakata City when I saw a man selling watermelons on a bridge. Suddenly, I started to remember another time when I saw a man selling watermelons. I was living in Jerusalem at the time, and it was one of those hot days in the Middle East when you start to sweat profusely every time you move. I was with my friends Adam and Oscar, and we were just wandering south along King David Avenue when we saw a man selling watermelons. He was driving a donkey cart along the road calling out “watermelons, watermelons”. Behind him on the cart was a pyramid of beautiful green watermelons. They were green and perfect. We just had to buy one. I ran up and got a watermelon from the watermelon man, and my friends and I went to a park to eat our watermelon.

There is a large park south of the King David Hotel, and we found a tree to escape from the sun, and we sat down with our watermelon. We couldn’t wait to eat it! It was such a hot day, and each of us could picture in our minds how delicious and thirst-quenching this watermelon was going to be. The problem was that the only one of us to have a knife was Adam, and his knife was one of those tiny Swiss army knives popular with backpackers. Adam stuck his knife into the watermelon, but the blade of the knife was maybe only three centimeters long while the watermelon must have been at least 30 centimeters wide and 60 centimeters long. We didn’t know what to do. Just as we were losing heart, a man started chuckling off to our left. He must have been in his fifties, and he had short grey hair and about three day’s stubble on his chin. My first reaction was to feel uncomfortable and to wonder why this man was laughing at us. I guessed that he was an Arab from East Jerusalem, and I figured he thought we were stupid American Jews. Then, in Hebrew he said he would open the watermelon for us. I still felt a little bit uncomfortable with the fact that he was talking to us, but Adam gave this man the watermelon and the Swiss army knife. The man then opened up the watermelon like magic using a few swift strokes with the knife and then cracking it open so that we could eat the juicy flesh inside. We were amazed, and thanked the man profusely while Adam offered him some of the watermelon. The man declined our offer and wished us a good meal. He then walked off smiling.

Inside that watermelon we ate in the park that day were the seeds of peace. If only I knew how to plant them and make them grow so that they could bear fruit and make more watermelons.

2004-04-27T21:03:00.000+09:00

http://www.countryreports.org/

http://globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/

Here are some more websites on current conflicts around the world

2004-04-27T20:33:00.000+09:00

http://www.flashpoints.info/start.html

Hi guys, the above is a website that lists all the current conflicts and wars going on in the world.

Later,

Scott

2004-04-26T18:29:00.000+09:00

I had a really great global issues class today. We listened to “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan, and then we talked about the meaning of peace. I think the reason that the class was so great is that my students are really starting to think for themselves. For example, we worked hard on trying to think of a definition for peace. Peace is a word that we use all the time, but when you try and explain exactly what it means, it can be really difficult. Some of the definitions that my students came up with were really great. I can tell that I am going to really enjoy the next couple of weeks of class.

I think this unit on peace and conflict is going to be one of the most meaningful in the course for me. As most of students know, I lived in Israel for two years, so I guess I have some experience of peace and conflict first hand. I can still remember sitting in a café in Jerusalem watching the jet planes fly overhead on their way to bomb Ramallah. I can also remember visiting my friends in south Jerusalem and hearing the mortar fire come from Beit Jalla as we were getting out of the car. I also remember my wonderful and beautiful high school students who were all going in the army the next year. I hope they are all okay. If only there were no armies . . .

Anyway, my students talked a bit today about peace and what it means to them. They also had to come up with some examples of peace. I want to share one of my personal examples of peace. When I was 28 years old, I was living and working on Kibbutz Palmachim. A kibbutz is a kind of collective farm, and on this farm there was also a huge concrete plant. My job was to work in the concrete plant three days a week, and then three other days of the week, I studied Hebrew. Anyway, this work was tough. We started work each day at six am, and we had to work outside all day cleaning concrete lines, lifting heavy machinery, and operating huge cranes. The work was hard, and most people hated it. Myself, I guess I kind of had a love – hate relationship with the work, because I hated having to get yelled at all the time by everyone, and sometimes I was really tired and dirty, but then again, sometimes I really liked being outside and doing physical labour.

Anyhow, the point of this story is that the work was hard. Most of the people like me were on the kibbutz to learn Hebrew. We were all Jewish. However, there were also some non-Jewish volunteers on the kibbutz as well. One of these volunteers was a young guy named Oliver from Germany. He was a really great guy, and we both got along together famously. We were always laughing, and whenever we worked together we had a good time. In short, we were friends.

One day, we were riding on top of a huge crane very early in the morning. We were both exhausted, and the day promised to be a hard one full of heavy dirty work. Oliver and I were just chatting as we rode on the crane towards where we would be working for the day. We were talking about how hard and crazy the work was. Suddenly, I looked at him, and I asked him, “why are you here?” I mean, I knew why I was there. I was Jewish, and I was learning Hebrew, but this guy was a German. He didn’t have to be in the middle of Israel working like a dog. He said that he was sent to Israel by a social club that he was in.

“A social club? You mean like a church group?” I asked.

“No, it is just a social club, and one of our activities is to learn more about the Jewish people and to do volunteer and welfare work in Israel”

I guess I was tired or something, but suddenly I looked at him and I just started to cry. .He didn’t notice that I was crying, so he just kept talking about this and that. However, before I knew it I started to really cry hard. In fact, I was sobbing loudly. Oliver looked at me like I was crazy.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

I couldn’t even speak hardly. “You’re German” I choked out. I started to cry even harder. “You’re German and we are friends.”

I was crying because there we were in Israel, a German and a Jew working together in a concrete factory and we were friends. 50 years ago he would have wanted to kill me, but now we joked together, laughed together and were able to complain together. That, for me, was one of the most beautiful moments in my life when I realized peace is possible. History doesn’t have to dictate the future, and past hates can be buried in the promise of a normal tomorrow where two guys can sit on top of a crane and laugh about their lives.

2004-04-19T08:26:00.000+09:00

Global Issues in Japan . . . . hmmm, it’s kind of hard to have deep thoughts about the situation in the world when it is eight o’clock in the morning, but I am going to try. I guess the biggest thing that I think about is how to teach a course in Global Issues while not being a hypocrite. I mean, I don’t want to say one thing in the class, and then do another thing in my real life. That is why I have started to recycle all of my milk and orange juice cartons. I was in Izumiya the other day, and I noticed that they have a large recycling centre right beside the mains doors near the McDonald’s restaurant. I can bring all of my old milk and orange juice cartons to this place, and then they will be recycled into something else rather than just being dumped in a landfill site. Anyway, in theory, this is a really great idea. Now I just have to do it! I have been collecting and washing out all of my milk and orange juice cartons for a while now. After I am finished with a carton, I quickly rinse it out, and then I throw it under the sink. The problem is that I now have so many empty cartons that every time I open the cupboard below the sink, they all fall out all over my kitchen floor. In fact, it got really bad yesterday night because I wanted to put another carton under my sink, and they all fell out just as my friend ringing my door to visit me! I had cartons everywhere! It was a mess! I was very tempted just to crush them and throw them all away in the garbage so that I didn’t have to deal with them, but then I thought about my global issues class. How can I talk about environmental issues in the classroom, and then throw out all my cartons at home? Anyway, I patiently put all the cartons back in the cupboard. I guess I will have to flatten them all down and take them to the recycling centre at Izumiya before I am tempted to throw them all away again!

2004-04-14T13:31:00.000+09:00

Hello everyone,

I was just looking for articles about global issues, and I found this great site. Here is the link: Global Envision. Click on the "article's" link, and then you can choose articles about the global economy, general globalization, health, the environment, technology, etc. Just click on the appropriate title.

Have fun!

2004-04-12T14:04:00.000+09:00

Good Job Guys! Today might have been a little bit confusing, but most of you seemed to do really well. There were just a few problems we the computers, but don't worry, I am sure that we are all going to have a lot of fun with these blogs.

If you don't see your name at the side of this blog, please send me your blog address and I will add it right away.

Have a great day!!

Scott

2004-04-12T08:36:00.000+09:00

Hi Guys!

Classes have started, and I hope that not everyone is too freaked out at this point! Just remember, keep up with your homework, do all of your assignments, and come to class, and you are going to be just fine.

I hope you all had a great weekend this past weekend. I had a really good weekend myself. This weekend I thought a lot about the environment, and how beautiful the countryside is in Japan. I climbed to the top of Atago-san with a friend of mine. It was really great!! I love hiking in Japan! I took the bus from the Keihan Sanjo station in Kyoto and went to Kiyotaki. From Kiyotaki I climbed up 924 metres to the top of Atago-san. The weather was absolutely beautiful, and I saw some amazing views of Kyoto while I was hiking. On top of Atago-san, there is a shrine. I thought the shrine was very interesting, especially the wood carvings of wild boar. I also had lunch on top of Atago-san while I was looking out over the beautiful views of the Japanese countryside. I made some tuna onigiri, and the sure tasted delicious after all the hard work of climbing to the top of the mountain!

After I had lunch and I looked around on top of the mountain, I started to hike towards Takao. However, I missed the short hiking trail to Takao!! I actually took a different trail that was much longer. However, the trail I took was really beautiful, and there were no people around at all. In the end I was very lucky because I got to see some beautiful flowers that I had never seen before. They were large white blossoms almost five centimetres wide. I also heard some really cool birds while I was hiking. It sounded like the same bird followed me during the entire hike. Also, if my friend and I had never taken the wrong trail, we would never have seen an ancient jizo with no head. It was a little bit scary, but I left a couple of coins beside the statue to bring me good luck. I hope it works.

Anyway, by the time I got to Takao, I was really tired, but the entire trip was worth it. There was only one thing that bothered me while I was hiking. From time to time, I would see garbage at the side of the trail. People had left empty coffee cans and plastic bags in some places. I picked up some of the old cans and put them in my backpack. It's so easy to carry your garbage back home, I wish more people would do this! However, it was still very beautiful - I recommend that you all get out on the weekends and go hiking!

Study hard, and I’ll see you all in class,

Scott.

2004-04-06T11:34:00.000+09:00

Hi guys,

I just found another great site at about.com about global issues. This one has all kinds of information. Have fun.

2004-04-01T11:16:00.000+09:00

Hi Guys,

I'm starting to really look forward to meeting all of you. I just found this website with lots of articles about global issues. I think you should check it out if you get the chance.

Cheers,

Scott.

2004-03-25T14:13:00.000+09:00

Hello Class,

Welcome to IES Introduction to Global Issues. I look forward to studying these issues with you, and learning a lot of English along the way.

Good luck,

Scott