Slow day today, as those who unlike me were able to keep their own bodies from breaking down spent most of the night having all sorts of fun and so needed to spend the day sleeping and/or otherwise recuperating. So I took it easy, and finished reading Shogun's Ghost.

…

If I ever meet the author, he is so going to leave the encounter sporting a permanent limp. Although I still can't say much over the veracity (or lack there of) in his factual data, now that I have reached the end I can confidently state this his presentation was disgustingly one sided. Revisiting my previous Columbine analogy, writing a book about American schools along the same vein would not only have me focusing on tragedies like that to the exclusion of all else, but I would also arrange my presentation to make it seem like the exact same thing either was happening or had the potential to- in every school in the country.

For example, I recognize several of the worst examples Schoolland cited, but what he failed to mention was that nearly all of the worst incidences occurred at the self styled 'reformatory' schools, which advertise themselves as being excessively strict and harsh, in order to straighten out problem students. The way that the data was presented in the book made it seem like these all happened in local-neighborhood-nihon. I don't know what got up this guy's nose to make him so upset at the Japanese educational system (that little anecdote about teaching English to a Japanese college class sure doesn't cut it) but he sure shows his bias to anyone who knows even a little about the subject.

Going off on a tangent, I might quite a few schoolchildren yesterday. There were apparently quite a few class trips to the same places we were going (shock and surprise, schools sending children to national historical sites) and one of the on-trip assignments from their English class was to stop and have a short conversation with any gaijin (like moi) they happened to stumble across. So I got to say 'hello' and sign my name in a couple of assignment books (to show they had actually done what they were supposed to) and get my picture taken in a couple of group photos.

Well, even if I didn't get to stay in Kyoto and party, I at least helped some kids get a grade.