The friend I was supposed to hang out with today called this morning and said she had a fever...and in my typical jerkface way I thought, "Sucks for her but lucky for me because I really need to work on my kids' graduation card today."

...and then I saw the calendar and remembered what day it was and decided to edit a picture of Kiku I did for one of my 5th graders a long time ago instead. It's been here for a while, but not on DA so I tried to make it a bit better...

One of the best teachers I've worked with since I've been here is the one who's in charge of the kids who are graduating jr high this year. She's been spending the last few weeks of English lessons teaching them more social studies related stuff, thinking about globalization, peace, humanitarianism, etc. One of the lessons was based on posters she happened to see (and then buy) on a recent trip to Tokyo produced by this NPO. The set she ordered was from this town.

She wanted the kids to see that disaster victims aren't just people to be pitied but that they're really brave. The posters all have both English and Japanese for some reason so we were able to do a short language activity too. The girls all really liked the one that says, "Ain't gonna take this anymore." (and then decided to use it on boys who annoyed them!) They all wrote essays about what they remembered about the earthquake and how they felt at the time, and now, and we decided to send some of the best ones to the NPO.

For those of us that live south of Tokyo the earthquake last year was scary, but not life changing. In Shizuoka we worried about a possible tsunami the first day but after that we just sort of stared at the TV feeling numb for the first weekend, and got shaken up by aftershocks for a few weeks after that. There was talk of rolling blackouts to save power for the people up north but nobody west of the Fuji river was affected and those east of it in our area had maybe two or three total. Schools collected money and a few festivals were canceled, but otherwise things went on as they always had.

In about an hour and a half the whole country will observe a moment of silence, at the exact moment of the quake last year. It's a typical sort of thing to do, but somehow it seems important.