The trouble with Chewbacca

To a lot of people Chewbacca is a fictional character in the Star Wars universe. To the Japanese it's something quite different. Let me explain...

A colleague of mine was teaching a very low level Japanese woman over the weekend. The lesson they were doing was about contact details - addresses, phone, email etc.

My colleague, who we will refer to as Nigel, used an imaginary email address of chewbacca@starwars.com.

The word "chewbacca" when translated to English from Japanese has the same meaning as dumb-arse, retard, dickhead, very thick, etc... It's a very powerful and rude word in Japan.

The student is up in arms over it now. She thinks Nigel was making fun of her and her inability to learn English. Yes, granted, she's not the best student we've got - in fact she's at home on the floor of the lower quartile.

Nigel doesn't know much Japanese and was completely unaware of the offence he was causing. Now some of the powers of the company are in damage control mode because the woman has mentioned quiting over it!

If this woman doesn't pull her head in, accept and understand the explanations by the company, then as far as I'm concerned she's chewbacca all the way!

Amen.

Colleague murdered

On my return to work today it was sad to learn of the news that a teacher working for my company in Tokyo was murdered during the time I was on holiday.

Whilst I never knew the girl and she worked at a school in Tokyo which I had never heard of, it drives home the message that although Japan appears a very safe country people are not spared the threat of nutcases.

The girl was found dead and buried in a balcony bathtub filled with sand. The police have a strong lead in the case and are looking for he owner of the apartment where her body was found. It is believed the owner of the apartment was a private student this girl gave tuition to on a Saturday morning.

More detailed story can be found by clicking here.

Sun setting on a great holiday

Today marks the end of my holiday and the start of work again.

It's been great to have a whole nine days off in a row.

As previous posts in my blog indicate, the main reason for this break was because Jacob was arriving. He's now safely settled into his new place, completed his work training and will be fronting his first five classes later this afternoon.

Work is pretty good really. There isn't much stress. It's all well organised, everyone knows what they're doing (mostly).

I think it'd just be nice to be kind of retired - everyday a Sunday type thing.

I've just realised it's Good Friday too. Easter is something that Japan miss off the schedule completely. They don't even attempt to milk its' commercial value like they do for Christmas and Valentines. Easter isn't even in their vocabulary. Can't even buy chocolate eggs!