第23回 WORKSHOP報告(10月1日) / 参加者92名

みなさんこんにちは。

10月1日(土)に行われた第23回workshop

の開催報告です。

 

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参加者 : 92名

うち新人の参加者 : 18名

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今回は90名を超える参加者の方々にお越し

いただき、幹事・スタッフも驚きです。

 

新人の方のご参加も18名となり、

自己紹介も多様で関西以外の御出身者も

多く、興味深いですね。

 
(新人のみなさんに冒頭で自己紹介をお願いしています)

 

懇親会にもたくさんの方々にお越しいただきました。

いつも、workshop会場近くの焼き鳥屋さんにお世話に

なることが多いのですが、そちらではお店を

いつも貸切にしていただいて、1階を「英語懇親会」

2階を「日本語懇親会」として、行き来も自由となって

います。お店のキャパは50人以上なのですが、今回は

そのキャパを超える参加者の皆さんにご参加いただき

うれしい悲鳴でした。ただ、こちらの焼き鳥屋さんに

お入りいただけなかった15名以上の方々には、付近の

居酒屋さんに移動していただくこととなりました。

その方々には大変ご不便をおかけしまして申し訳

ありませんでした<m(__)m>

 

キャパOKの会場を探さないといけませんね。

 

workshop前半>

今回の前半マテリアル作成者はSさんです。

Sさんからのご提案は「アウトドア体験に関するチャット」

でした。10月に入りましたが、アウトドア活動には

本当にいい季節になりましたね。

新人の方の中には、豊中から梅田まで自転車で来られている方が

おられたり、また海外でのジャングルツアー体験などを

語ってくださった方もおられました。

ちなみにSさんの大学時代のご専門は「アザラシ研究」

だった、とお伺いしました!相当ハードな

環境下での御研究だったと思われます。

おそらく、半端ではないアウトドア体験もお持ちなのでしょうね!

Sさんマテリアルご提案ありがとうございました!

 

workshop後半>

後半のマテリアル作成者はKさんでした。

3月11日の東日本大震災に関する記事・テレビ番組を取り上げて、

欧米の個人主義(Indivisualism)と日本人の特性と言われる集団主義

(Collectivism)の比較についてのマテリアルを作成していただきました。

 
(こちらは上級者グループの様子です)

 

日本人の民族性として、集団主義があげられることがありますが、

集団主義の定義、またその集団主義に対比される個人主義の定義とは

といわれると、答えることは難しいですね。

Kさんは今回初めてのチェアパーソンで、英語の専門書なども

ご使用になり、入念に準備を進めていただきました。

用語の定義などの知識から、事例として使用したNHKクローズアップ

現代の番組提案まで、初心者でも取り組みやすいように、

マテリアルを仕上げてくださいました。

Kさんありがとうございました!

 

 

  マテリアル作成者には、workshopの冒頭で自己紹介を含めた

簡単なスピーチをお願いしているのですが、幹事の私が

わかりにくい説明で後半のスタート時間をご案内してしまった

ため、スピーチの時間が短くなり、またメンバーのみなさんを

お待たせすることになりまして、申し訳ありませんでした。

 

それでは今回の案内メールをご覧ください。

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<英語サークル E’s club 第23回workshopのご案内>

 

みなさまこんにちは、E’s club幹事のKです。第23回workshopの詳細をお送りいたします。

 

今回のマテリアルは前半をSさんに、後半をKさんに作成していただきました。

前半は「アウトドア、自然体験」をテーマにしたチャット、後半は「日本人の集団主義」をテーマとしたディスカッションです。

 

 

[今週のマテリアル]

 

<first halfSさん作成>

行楽の秋ですね。今回のテーマは「アウトドア、自然体験」です。

自然の中で活動することは好きですか?

最近は、これまで自然と無縁だった都会の女子の間でも山ガールや釣りガールなどのアウトドアブームに乗っている人もいるようです。私の友人の中にも華奢な感じの普通のOLなのに突然、富士登山に挑戦した人がいました。

また、数年前より小学生の環境教育の一環として、自然体験活動が取り入れられてきているようです。

皆さんにとっては、自然は身近なものになってきているでしょうか?特に興味がないものでしょうか?子供の頃の体験や最近のおすすめのアウトドア、新たなブームを生み出す方法などを話し合ってみて下さい。アウトドア体験は、キャンプ、登山、釣り、川遊び、海水浴、ダイビング、ラフティング、ハイキング、スキー、バーベキューなどなんでも良いです。

また、思い出の写真、風景等があればぜひ持ってきて下さい。

 

参考:自然体験活動(Wikipedia

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%87%AA%E7%84%B6%E4%BD%93%E9%A8%93%E6%B4%BB%E5%8B%95

 

1.自然は好きですか?苦手ですか?

Do you like nature?

・苦手な理由はなんですか?

If you don’t like, why ?

・日常で自然を感じることは多いですか?少ないですか?

(季節の草花、虫の声、夕日、月など)

Do you often feel nature in your daily life?

 

2.子供の頃によく自然の中で遊んでいましたか?アウトドア体験は多かったですか?

 Did you often play in nature? Did you often go outdoors?

・子供の頃の自然体験が多い人ほど自然に興味を持つようになると思いますか?

Do you think the more outdoor experiences we have in childhood, the more interested in nature we become?

 

3.今まで経験したアウトドアについて話して下さい。

 Talk about your outdoor experiences.

・写真があれば紹介して下さい。

If you have some pictures, please show other members in your group.

・最高のアウトドア体験、最悪なアウトドア体験(危険な目に遭った、怪我をしたなど)について

 Talk about your best outdoor experience and worst outdoor experience.

 

4.やってみたいアウトドアやおすすめのアウトドアについて話して下さい。

 Talk about the outdoor activities you want to try or you recommend.

 

5.ファッション性を高めて女性客を引き込んだように、より多くの人にアウトドアに興味を持ってもらうために、どんな工夫をしたらいいと思いますか?自分がアウトドア用品店やアウトドアツアー関係の経営者だとして考えてみて下さい。

 What should we do to attract more people to outdoor activities?

 Think about that from the viewpoint of the manager of outdoor goods store or outdoor tour company.

 

 

<latter halfKさん作成>

 

<AGENDA>

Is Japanese collectivism a virtue or a vice in case of catastrophic disaster? How should we act?

 

Q1: Japanese society is often categorized as “collectivism” when compared with Western individualistic culture, and we always value conformity and interdependence.

First, do you agree with this view? Talk about your personal experiences and illustrate them.

 

Q2: Imagine you were in the Tohoku region during 3.11 catastrophes.

Which is more probable to you?

1) Try (secretly) to steal something to survive or even join looting,

2) Patiently search available shop to buy something or wait in line for rations long time.

 

Q3: If 3.11 level’s earthquake happened in the city center of Osaka (or Tokyo), how would people act to strangers?

Do you think they cooperate and help each other just like people in the Tohoku region?

 

Q4: Do you know Ookawa elementary school’s mass tragedy?

Most children died because they were patiently waiting teachers’ final decision of evacuation site, even though there was a hill just behind their school.

What was the cause of this miserable result?

Did Japanese collectivistic belief system affect somehow?

*If you got a PC and can connect online, watch NHK closeup Gendai for your reference:

http://cgi4.nhk.or.jp/gendai/kiroku/detail.cgi?content_id=3095

and /or if you really have another spare time, read global post’s article too.

 

Q5: Taking all things into consideration, do you think Japanese nationality and its discipline work pretty well in the case of devastating disaster?

Or do we need to value and grow our independency much more?

 

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Japanese, Waiting in Line for Hours, Follow Social Order After Quake

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES and RUSSELL GOLDMAN

SENDAI, Japan, March 15, 2011

 

Overnight and into the grey, chilly morning, long lines formed outside small convenience stores and supermarkets throughout the tsunami-ravaged city of Sendai.

At one, Daiei, the orderly lines had begun 12 hours before the shop opened and stretched for blocks.

“I came to get baby food for my 2-week-old nephew,” said Maki Habachi, 23, who had been patiently standing for four hours and still had an eight-hour wait to go. “My sister only has one day’s food left.”

Without fuel for her car, she had ridden for two days by bike just to find food. Even bottled drinks in the ubiquitous corner vending machines were sold out. Despite the line’s length everyone remained calm and polite.

 

As Japanese survivors cope with food and gasoline shortages amidst the aftershocks and rising body count, they draw on a sense of social order. Unlike scenes in natural disasters in Haiti and New Orleans, there is little anger, no looting.

Neighbors are willing to share with others and cutting back on energy use to limit the need for rotating blackouts.

 

Tokyo’s Shibuya district — the Times Square of Tokyo — is dark tonight. The flashing neon signs and constantly cycling digital displays here in the vibrantly-colored crossroads of Japan have been turned off voluntarily.

The contrast to popular images of Shibuya as seen in American films like, “Lost in Translation,” is striking.

 

Four days after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami, “They are doing OK,” said Ron Provost, president of Showa Boston Institute for Language and Culture, a campus of the University of Tokyo. “These are tough, strong, strong people.

“I think they are coping as well as could be expected or even better, if you imagine us being in that situation,” he said. “That strength and resilience are rooted in a culture that has historically relied on social organization.”

Some of that community-minded resilience may come from its geography and dense population. Japan is only slightly smaller than the state of California and has a population of 127 million people.

 

The public broadcaster NHK is reporting 1 million Japanese missing and some have estimated the death toll could climb into the tens of thousands. An estimated 2.5 million households, or 4 percent of Japan’s total population, are without electricity.

Showa Boston’s Tokyo-based faculty are reporting that commuter train stations are jammed with sporadic service and up to four-hour delays, forcing many to stay overnight in the city.

“People have opened up their homes to others,” he said. “I heard someone say they had two bottles of water and gave one to someone else.”

On a daily basis — in tragedy and in good times — the Japanese have “come up with a system to accommodate each other,” said Provost.

“They are kind to the neighbors and look out for their neighbors,” he said. “That’s why the crime rate is low. You see someone doing something and you go to the local police.”

 

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan addressed the nation Sunday night and said this is the most serious crisis to face the nation since World War II, calling on people to come together deepen the bonds that unite them — a phrase, “ittai,” that means to become one body.

Family ties, social hierarchies and a collective spirit are important to the Japanese, unlike the culture of individualism that predominates in the United States.

“There is no question the Japanese respond well to this kind of catastrophe, but even if it looks remarkable from the outside, it’s not new,” said Carol Gluck, a professor of modern Japanese history at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. “It’s not cultural or religious — it is a historically created social morality based on a response to the community and social order.”

“It’s not that the Japanese are naturally passive and obedient,” she said. “There is a historically created social value to it. People uphold it. It works. Someone leaves something in the subway and they get it back. When you find something you give it to the lost and found.”

“In this catastrophe, it’s striking when compared to Western countries. We kind of expect looting,” Gluck said. “It happens in good and bad times, probably from the pay-off from seeing that operate.”

 

Social models like these take a long time to develop, according to Gluck, and they are partly rooted in the economics of cooperative rice agriculture and the influences of Confucianism, a Chinese philosophy that emphasizes a social morality and “the way one treats his fellow man.”

Christianity, for example, puts a far greater emphasis on “transcendental faith” and man’s relation to God.

“It’s a piece of the larger picture if you think of the self in society,” she said. The societal emphasis also carries over into the Japanese corporate world.

 

“Westerners often comment, why is it [Japanese] executives of large corporations don’t live much better or get 100 times more remuneration than those who work for them?” Gluck said. “A kind of leveling goes with this.”

The flip side of that sense of order is the discomfort with those who are not fully Japanese. More ethnically homogenous than American society, Japan is less tolerant of outsiders, foreign immigrants and mixed-race marriages and their children. “It’s based on values that are very exclusive,” she said.

“There is an in group and an out group and one reason society works the way it does is the group takes care of one another and the out group is on the outs,” Gluck said. “It can even be the next village. There is a rejection of people outside the circle.”

 

 

Eric Stephanus, an American who worked as an insurance marketing manager and lived in Japan for a decade in the 1980s, said that “conformity is valued above all else.”

“Japan was a feudal society until the 19th century with very stratified classes and responsibilities, with very strict consequences if you stepped out of line,” he said. “Talking socially, that’s why there is bullying,” said Stephanus, 60, who now lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. “Children who are not fully Japanese can’t go to schools because they are bullied. They look a little different.”

 

The Japanese have a great respect and trust in authority.

“One aspect is to conform to your peers and realize what place in society you are in,” he said. “It’s incomprehensible not to obey an order that someone above you gave you — like a policeman or a bureaucrat. There is no tradition of individual rights or looking at things critically. You are part of the herd. … It absolutely works wonderfully and is effective for social control.”

 

But the Japanese seem fatalistic when tragedy strikes. Stephanus said he was “stunned” by a photo in Sendai after the earthquake. “A bus stop was crushed by one of the buildings and I looked at the people in the street — they were shopping and got their purses and were smiling,” he said. “It’s not that surprising. The Japanese always take a morbid fascination in disasters.”

He said people took a “ghoulish interest” in color newspaper photos when Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashed into two mountain ridges in 1985. The deadliest single aircraft accident in history, it killed 505.

 

Stephanus doesn’t discount the “real traumas” that affect Asian societies. “Every family has a story,” he said. “But they have a strange fatalism. Everyone has a fate and there is no sense of fighting about it.”

Even though the Japanese are not religious, their belief system may be anchored in tenets of Buddhism — souls are recycled from one life to the next.

 

But as the threat of a nuclear meltdown increases, the patience of the Japanese will be tested.

“The resilience of the Japanese has limits,” said William Bodiford, a specialist in Japanese religions from UCLA, who is currently on sabbatical in Japan. “If the authorities cannot respond effectively, then the bonds of trust that sustain this resiliency could break.”

Few places on earth have suffered the magnitude of death than Japan. In 1945 during World War II, American pilots dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The acute affects killed up to 250,000 civilians combined in both blasts, but many more were maimed or died slow deaths from burns and radiation sickness.

 

“Few other places in the world have had the accumulation of history as Japan,” said Fred Bemak, professor of psychology at George Mason University who has experience in cross-cultural counseling in Asia. He founded the group Counselors Without Borders, which responds to international disasters.

“When you top that with the earthquake in Kobe, there has been historical trauma through the generations and experiences in very severe and dramatic loss and death,” Bemak said. “There’s a whole intergenerational psychology of resilience.”

 

The world had not yet seen the public face of grief that Bemak said will emerge when the Japanese have ceremonials for the thousands of dead.

“Japan is the most prepared country in the world and that’s no accident,” he said. “It’s part of the national proof — we are in shape to handle this.”

 

Part of the much-described Asian culture of “saving face” is coping, according to Bemak.

“Expression of grief is culturally driven. Right now there are no burials going on because there is too much chaos. It’s, how can I find water and I need food for my mother or my child. It’s the survival instinct,” he said. “The deep pain and grief come after, when the ceremonial mourning begins.”

ABC’s Jay Shaylor contributed to this report from Tokyo.

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/japan-victims-show-resilience-earthquake-tsunami-sign-sense/story?id=13135355

 

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Japan: Amid many tragedies, one school’s story

Gavin Blair [2]March 25, 2011 06:16

The students and teachers at Ookawa school knew what to do when the tsunami warning sounded. But they never thought it would happen to them.

OOKAWA, Japan – After the earthquake struck on March 11, the tsunami warning sounded near Ookawa Elementary School, located in this riverside town two miles inland from the sea in Ishinomaki, northeastern Japan.

 

But having never been hit by post-quake waves before, nobody in the town thought it would reach them. The teachers filed the more than 80 children out of their classrooms and onto the playground, where they thought they would be safe from aftershocks.

One of the teachers, Jinji Endo, pleaded with the others to seek higher ground. He took the one child who would listen to him and fled up the steep hill behind the school.

 

Everyone else was still inside the school grounds when the 25-foot wall of water rose out of the Kitakami River, up and over the nearby rice paddies.

All but a shell of the school was washed away by the tsunami. Only the one teacher who went up the hill and a couple of dozen pupils survived, most of whom were absent that day.

Heavy digging equipment was only able to reach Ookawa on Thursday, 13 days after the disaster, revealing the full scale of the devastation that occurred here.

 

The roads had been impassable for large vehicles. Two hundred feet of a connecting bridge was carried a mile upstream, and the only other road was torn to pieces by the tsunami.

I can’t help thinking that if they had only gone up the hill just behind the school, they would likely have survived,” said Emi Ogata, whose two children were among those who died. “The teachers did their best to protect the children, they died too. I can’t blame them.”

 

Rescue workers have found the body of her son, 10-year-old Ryusei, but not yet her daughter, Karen, 7.

We can’t cremate the bodies as the person who does it died too,” said their father, Kazutoshi Ogata. “We got special permission to bury him, so we laid him in the grounds of the temple, which is just up the hill. At least we have buried our son; we can only wait to find our daughter.”

We found our son’s school bag, his safety helmet and calligraphy brushes, but nothing of our daughter’s yet. My elder son, who is 13, is still alive ― he was at the nearby junior high school and was saved. All I can do is live for him now.”

They were such lively kids, all three of them do karate, and Ryusei was already a black belt,” said Kazutoshi Ogata as his wife showed a photo of their two youngest children in their karate suits at a local tournament.

Once the diggers arrived, bodies were found by the dozens.

I’ve looked at so many dead children trying to identify my own, and most of them are friends of my kids, or classmates, it hurts so much,” said Kazutoshi Ogata, who helped firefighters with the initial search using shovels and his bare hands.

 

No buildings in Ookawa were left standing, save the shell of the school and a hospital. Only foundations bear witness to more than a hundred houses that once stood here. Residents say fewer than 100 of the town’s original 500 survived, though nobody yet knows for sure.

 

Kazuo Takahashi, 60, is still looking for the bodies of his wife, mother and two grandchildren.

In 300 years no tsunamis have hit this area, so most people didn’t try and escape when the warnings came. They thought they were safe,” he said.

The Fukudas also lost two children: the body of their daughter, Risa, 12, who was due to graduate the sixth grade last week, has been found, while their son, 9-year-old Masaki, is still missing.

I walked here to the school after the tsunami, in knee-deep water. There were rumors that some of the children had been helicoptered out, but it wasn’t true,” said their mother, Miyuki Fukuda, 43.

They were such good kids, they got good grades and they listened to what we told them. Risa was learning the piano and had just started learning English,” she said. “She was only 12 but she was taller than me, and really mature, like an adult.”

My son had such a beautiful face, he really did. He was a fast runner and enjoyed being in school plays, and he was good in them. People used to compliment me about it, but being Japanese, I would say ‘oh no, not really.’ I couldn’t say it when he was alive, but I can now,” she said with a broad smile, her eyes filling with tears. “He was good in them, he was really, really good.”

 

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japan/110324/japan-ookawa-tsunami-earthquake