The Japanese love to talk about the weather. I suppose when you have a country with such a diverse climate it’s hard not to. The beaches in Okinawa rival any tropical paradise, and snowy Hokkaido is a Mecca for skiers and snowboarders from around the world.
The seasons are very clearly separated in Japan. The Japanese are very proud of this fact and often ask foreigners whether they have 四季 (shiki, four seasons) in their own countries. In Fukuoka, winters (冬, fuyu) are generally mild with snow falling maybe once or twice a year. Spring (春, haru) is a great time of year to visit as the temperatures get warmer and the 桜 (sakura, cherry blossom) start to bloom. Then, the 梅雨 (tsuyu, rainy season) hits in late May/early June bringing a month of rain and sweat. Summers (夏, natsu) are hot with high humidity and air-conditioning is a must! Finally, autumn (秋, aki), with it’s 紅葉 (kouyou, leaves changing colour), is a great time to experience outdoor Japan.

The continually changing seasons are always a topic of conversation. When writing letters, it is standard practice to add a weather-related comment at the very beginning of the letter, even if it’s an impersonal mass mailing from a company to its customers! The Japanese version of Microsoft Word has a function to automatically insert the relevant phrase, by just selecting the season and the current weather:


This inserts a super-polite phrase like this one into your document:
菊花の候、貴社ますますご盛栄のこととお喜び申し上げます。平素は格別のご高配を賜り、厚くお礼申し上げます。

Having recently come back to Japan from a trip to the UK, I was barraged with the usual questions about my home country. The first of which wasn’t “Did you have a good time?” or “Where did you visit?” but always, “Was the weather cold?”!!

We finally got around to updating our teacher introductions page to reflect some of the new teachers who have been hired recently. Not all new teachers have been added yet, though, so we'll keep updating the page whenever we have time!
We also sadly said goodbye to a few teachers whose contracts expired at the end of summer, including Takako-sensei, who is off to work with JICA (the Japan International Cooperation Agency, similar to the US Peace Corps), teaching Japanese language and culture in Bulgaria!
If you have a message for any of the teachers who left, feel free to mail it to us, and we'll pass it along!

GenkiJACS was recently approved as a recognized school for the German bildungsurlaub, or educational leave program. Qualifying German nationals can now receive 10 days of state-sponsored study leave with us.
We have been approved for the following states: Berlin, Brandenburg, Hamburg, Hessen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein
The Bildungsurlaub program allows employees to apply for up to 10 extra days of educational leave to study a foreign language abroad.
There is a little more info on our site here. For more information, contact us!

One of our staff members also teaches at a local university, and was surprised this week to receive a student’s homework assignment that looked like this:



It’s notepaper with ads! The bottom 5th of each page has an ad for a local business, targeted at university students’ wants: karaoke bars, Internet cafes, cheap Internet providers, clothes, and so on. The student said that people were handing this out in front of the university, similar to the tissues that are often handed out at train stations.
It’s ingenious, in a way – there really is no place that advertising can’t reach!

We received a letter recently informing us that the only official Western Union agent in Japan, Suruga Bank, is ceasing to handle Western Union money transfers. This means that students cannot use Western Union to pay school fees anymore.
Their official release (in Japanese) is here. The only thing approaching a reason given is that their partnership with Western Union has expired, and will not be renewed.
The other options previously available for GenkiJACS students to pay are of course still available: International or domestic bank transfer, international postal money order, credit card, Paypal and Moneybookers.

At long last, a follow-up to our year-old post on strange Japanese customs. To recap, we put a blank sheet of paper on the wall and asked students to write any strange customs or cultural things they noticed in Japan on that paper. Last year we gave you numbers 1 to 20. This year, numbers 21 to 46:

21: Japanese gear shift! (We don’t know exactly what the student was surprised about – are they very different from those in other countries? Almost all cars in Japan are automatic, but also allow manual switching.)
22: Traditional Japanese bath (You are expected to wash your body before you get in the bath, and everyone shares the same water.)
23: Japan is the #1 importer of reggae. (It’s true that reggae, and hip-hop, are very popular in Japan – there are always posters and fliers around the downtown area for concerts.)
24: Girls stopping dead in their tracks to yell かわいい！ (“kawaii”, or “cute”)
25: Overly complicated toilets (Many Western-style toilets in Japan include heated seats with temperature control, adjustable bidet functions, sound effects, and more.)
26: Customs has a mascot. (Sometimes it seems like almost all companies and offices have a cute cartoon mascot – even the tax office puts little animals on their documents…)
27: Everyone assumes I’m American. (Japanese people do have an unfortunate tendency to ask foreigners “Are you American?” This can be very annoying for non-US people.)
28: Bus drivers turn off the bus during red lights. (This is most likely to help reduce pollution. There is a fairly large campaign called “Stop the idling”.)
29: and my friend told me there’s a sign on the bus saying that the exhaust is good for the environment!
30: People saying えええええええええええええええ (“eeeeeeeeeeeeee”, an expression of surprise. Usually said with a rising intonation).
31: Public buses have no priority over other cars, and no separate lanes.
32: No napkins even in good restaurants. (Although, to be fair, they do give you a wet towel instead.)
33: I went to a Japanese party and they were separated into 先輩 (“senpai”, senior) and 後輩 (“kouhai”, junior).
34: Bike riders wear gloves to protect themselves from the sun, but no helmets!
35: Why do so many people hand out packets of tissues but it is rude to blow your nose in public?
36: Hand basin on top of toilet cistern. (This is often considered a case of good design – the clean water going into the toilet cistern can be used to wash your hands after using the toilet.)
37: Little flashing lights on kerbs and junctions at night.
38: Riding bikes with high heels.
39: Look! There’s another 外人 (“gaijin”, foreigner)! (Yes, foreigners are still somewhat rare in Fukuoka, but the number is increasing all the time!)
40: No laughing in the movie theater. (This might be because subtitles aren’t as funny as the original movie, but in general Japanese people are pretty quiet at movies – even scary ones.)
41: Swatting flies by clapping your hands.
42: Girls shave their arms and eyebrows as well as their legs.
43: There’s two settings on the toilet handle, 小 (“shou”, small) and 大 (“dai”, big).
44: The public transport system – it works!
45: There are billions of vending machines!
46: My host father took off his pants after dinner because he was too hot! (We’ve seen this in several places, actually, including teachers at a high school unzipping their pants when hot.)

The Japan Times reports that London magazine Monocle named Fukuoka as the best city in the world for shopping! Reasons include the compactness of the central shopping district, the big selection of brand names, and the closeness to Asia.
Fukuoka was also chosen as the city with the 17th highest quality of life in the world – and only the second city in Japan, after Tokyo! Cities were ranked on a variety of factors, including friendliness, safeness, cleanliness, transport and more. Fukuoka is on this list for the first time, perhaps showing how much its profile has grown in recent years. As if you needed another reason to come here!
The original article is for Monocle subscribers only, unfortunately, but if you happen to be one of those, click here to read Fukuoka’s entry!

Alternatively, the article seems to be available as a PDF here, although perhaps not for long...

A couple of choice quotes:
“Friendly, cosmopolitan Fukuoka is tiny in comparison to Tokyo, but it beats the Japanese capital hands down with its cuisine and shopping.”
“these days it’s all about Fukuoka”

It's nice to hear that everyone else is finally catching up with what we knew years ago!

The busy summer season means that this blog doesn't get updated nearly as often as we would like, but much has changed in the last month or so that we would like tell you about. For today, though, we wanted to mention one recent thing that we are very proud of.
We receive students from several agencies, including Languagecourse.net, which is based in Barcelona. They ask returning students to provide feedback on the school they studied at. Throughout the last year, GenkiJACS received an average customer satisfaction rating of 4.7 out of 5!

In Languagecourse.net’s own words:
"Only the very best schools receive the Excellence Award ... to certify that superior customer satisfaction has been acknowledged by LanguageCourse.Net. The feedback of your clients showed that your school did excellent work in providing satisfied customers throughout the last year. Overall rating: 4.7 (out of 5.0)"

Here's the actual document:

If you visit our main site, you may notice a little black bar in the bottom-left-hand corner. This is a chat box, and if it says "Click to talk to GenkiJACS rep!", you're just one click away from us! We can't promise to be online 24 hours a day, but when we are, we're happy to answer your questions straight away. And you're almost completely anonymous - no login is required, and the only identifying information sent to us is your IP address.

The service is provided by Hab.la, and is theoretically platform-independent. However, if you have any problems using it, please do drop us a line!

Unfortunately, at first only sales and marketing reps will be available to talk to you - no Japanese teachers on hand to answer your grammar questions instantaneously just yet, I'm afraid...

In our never-ending quest to improve our students' Japanese, we've linked up with Japan Online School (J-OS), a Japanese school offering webcam lessons over the Internet, to offer a special discount to GenkiJACS students who sign up with them.

First, the problem:
Many students tell us that they don’t have a chance to practice their Japanese after returning to their home countries. Without practice, you WILL forget what you studied, but if there is no Japanese community in your home area, keeping up your conversation practice can be very difficult.
This is where an online school like J-OS can come in very useful. Trained teachers and private lessons ensure that you don’t forget the Japanese you learned at GenkiJACS!
After considering all of the major online schools, we chose J-OS because of the good structure of their lessons, the quality of their teachers, and the simplicity of their system.

Now, the package:
Standard private lessons are roughly 1,900 yen for 50 minutes. However, GenkiJACS and J-OS have teamed up to offer a special deal for graduating GenkiJACS students:

1) Free trial lesson (normally 980-1280 yen)
2) 1 extra lesson free when you first buy lessons (so, for example, 5 lessons for the price of 4)

There is no extra cost to students for this - GenkiJACS pays for your trial lesson by cutting costs elsewhere. We took this step because we don't want students forgetting the Japanese they spent time and money learning, and the only way to keep it up is regular practice!

This deal is only open to graduating GenkiJACS students. If you are a GenkiJACS student who graduated between January 1st, 2008 and now, you are also eligible. Contact us for details!