Chopsticks

Dan's kindergarten is very big on shitsuke. It's a word that when you use it about dogs means something like "obedience training." For children, I'm finding, it means teaching them how to be good little Japanese citizens, with all the skills nicely brought up Japanese girls and boys are supposed to absorb by example from their well-behaved Japanese parents.

Every month Dan brings home a shitsuke sheet with that month's objective, a little drawing to color in each day to show he's practised it, and a space for my comments at the bottom. Once it's filled in, it goes back to the kindergarten for his teacher to add her comments, and is then brought home again to be tied together with its fellows with a cute little ribbon. Of course I always forget about it until the day after it's due, so Dan colors in the whole lot in one fell swoop and takes it in late with my apologetic little note added to the comments. (Like most of the kindergarten mothers, I'm now highly practised at little apologetic notes.)

At the beginning the objectives were pretty easy: "Let's get dressed by ourselves!" "Let's put our shoes on the right way round!" "Let's eat up all our supper every night!" Having been in daycare, Dan has been dressing himself since he was two and eats second helpings every night, so I've been patting myself on the back on staying ahead of the game. Until this month's sheet arrived.

"Let's use chopsticks properly!"

Now, chopstick use is something I've never completely mastered myself. That's despite all the times I get told "Ah, you're so good at eating with chopsticks!" One of the first things you realize about comments like this, not to mention "Ah, you speak Japanese so well!" if you open your mouth to say "Good morning," is that they're covert expressions of surprise that as a foreigner you can manage it at all. In fact, the better you get at speaking Japanese, the less you find you're complimented on it; and when someone does exclaim how well you speak, it inevitably means you've just made a mistake and your listener is covering up their embarrassment. It's rather shaming, then, that people still tell me that I'm good with chopsticks, because what that actually means is they're wincing at the clumsiness with which I'm curling my second and third fingers at the wrong angle, which grates on their sensibilities even if I do actually get the food in my mouth 99% of the time.

I didn't even try teaching Kei how to use chopsticks, hoping that as he went to daycare the teachers would take care of it there. They were fantastic at potty training and buttoning coats, but apparently chopsticks were't part of the deal: the way Kei holds them is far from the approved Japanese grip. (And this being Japan, there is of course only one approved grip; everything else, even if it works, is Wrong with a capital W.) My mother-in-law tries to reteach him every time we visit, but it seems it's one of those things that's really hard to relearn the correct way once you've learned it wrong.

So working on correct chopstick use with Dan is a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, having learned from my experience with Kei, when Dan was two I bought him a pair of training chopsticks, with loops to put your fingers through to hold them in the right positions. They seem to have worked, as my mother-in-law regularly praises him enthusiastically for his expert grip. Unfortunately they don't make them in large enough sizes for adult.

I console myself by reminding myself that not all Japanese people are perfectly proficient with chopsticks either, and by watching this video from the comedy duo The Rahmenz. Perhaps I should just give up and go with their "International Style"...

City view

The Sunday afternoon view across Osaka from Satsukiyama, a few miles north of our house.

Children's book meme

Concerned about the extra-long silence on this blog, Laura over at Rehearsal Times Over has gone and tagged me for another meme, this time to name seven favourite children's books. It's an interesting question - my favourites when I was a child, or those I love best now? Or the ones Kei and Dan enjoy most, which would be a completely different list?

For the time being, here's an integrated list with a few of each of our top favourites, old and new.

1. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl

Or indeed anything else by Roald Dahl. One of the unexpected joys of having children has been the chance to catch up on books and films I missed out on as a child myself. I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when I was about nine and loved it, and both boys are fascinated by it too. But now we're discovering a whole world of other Roald Dahl titles - I've just finished reading James and the Giant Peach as our latest bedtime story, and it's been great to read both Matilda and The BFG for the first time.

2. The Snail and the Whale, by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

Dan loves this rhyming story of a sea snail with a yearning for travel, who hitches a lift on the tail of a humpback whale and ends up saving its life. And I have to admit I get a kick out of reading save-the-whale stories to my kids in whale-eating Japan. (Kentaro sees nothing wrong with whaling - it's one of our major points of contention, and I'm resigned to the fact it'll never be resolved.)

3. The Indian in the Cupboard, by Lynn Reid Banks

Laura lent me this, and I can't thank her enough. I'd read The L-Shaped Room, a grown-up novel by the same author, and enjoyed it, but I wasn't prepared for either how strongly her children's writing would grasp Kei's imagination or the sheer excellence of her prose. Other books I read straight afterwards, even ones that had been old favourites, seemed dull and lumpish by comparison.

4. The Horrid Henry series, by Francesca Simon

Horrid Henry books are what Kei currently reads for himself, when he's not immersed in a Dragonball manga borrowed from his calligraphy classroom. Henry loves violent toys, junk food, and gory computer games; he loathes school, vegetables, and his oh-so-well-behaved little brother, Perfect Peter. He's every mother's nightmare, and every seven-year-old boy's secret idea of how he'd actually like to behave...

5. Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, by Richard Scarry

This is another of Dan's favourites. It and other Richard Scarry titles are nice because they work on lots of different levels - you can read them like a story, play I-Spy (to find the little yellow beetle Goldbug), or spend ages looking at all the different illustrations on each page.

6. No, David! by David Shannon

This is well loved in Japanese translation too. Not that there's much to translate - almost every page shows David doing somthing naughty, with variations on the caption "No, David!" But its ending of "Yes, David, I love you" is really reassuring for the boys if they've just spent most of the evening being told "No" for themselves...

7. Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White

One of the best children's stories EVER. Enough said!

I'm not going to tag anyone myself, as I've been out of blogging circulation for so long I have no idea who's already done this one and who hasn't. But please add your own favourites in the comments if you like.