I've somehow lost the ability to put titles up. Everything's still in Japanese and until I learn kanji or find a computer with an English operating system, my entries will probably keep deteriorating like this.

Yesterday I decided to give the deep-fried mystery meat with mysterious brown sauce over it a try since someone told me that it was curry. It was actually not too bad.

I was programmed for two Voices yesterday. One was a *special voice* on Canada that had been booked in since last week. The students didn't seem to like it too much, but I really enjoyed it. I had the students brainstorm to tell me all the negative things they could think about Canada. They were scared to give them to me, but I told them bad things about Japan and that eased it up a little (maybe envoked a bit of bitterness) so they were able to tell me that Canada is too cold, too inefficient, you need a car to do anything, has not enough shops, similar to the United States and "living expenses are low" (essentially, you can't earn enough money in Canada). And I guess that's all true. They also said some way out there things like that we eat a lot of fish and the cold air makes us all warm-hearted, but I shut those misconceptions down pretty quickly.

My second voice was with a really old woman (like 80) who I had a voice with last week. She had come in late last week and didn't get much of a chance to talk to me, so she was really happy she had the whole forty minutes this time. I asked her all about World War II and it was really interesting. She said that Japanese people were so devoted to the emperor at the time that they didn't think for themselves and they didn't even know why they were attack the USA when they bombed Pearl Harbour. She said they considered the emperor to be a god and when he told them to hate the USA at the beginning of the war, they obeyed and at the end of the war he told them that the Americans were going to come occupy them and absolutely no one resisted.

She also said that only the people in Okinawa (islands to the south) had even seen the Americans during the war, the rest of them were just being bombed by anonymous birds in the sky. They were terrified of them coming to occupy them and sent all their young women out to the country because they thought that they would be raped (makes sense since that's what the Japanese did when they occupied other countries, I'm told). But when the Americans arrive, she said, everything got better. She said General MacArthur was a great man and gave them all free skim milk (people were starving at the time). That generation became, on average, 10cm taller than their parents. The Americans helped write the Japanese constitution, allowing women's and peasants' rights. She was finally allowed to vote and in the early 50s attended university. I've always thought of the United States in the 1950s as being a horrible superpower throwing around their weight, but her accounts of how much better things became definitely make me second-guess that opinion.

Whew, time to go to work again. I have my big evaluation today, so Dani will sit in on one of my lessons. Shit.