Enough of my extolling the virtues of imperfection, on to the presentations themselves! I can't remember all the topics, but some that stand out in my memory include jury service (a bit complex, but I think it's been proposed to involve a larger number of people in it), security cameras (most people are content to sacrifice the small amount of privacy for the safety they provide, but apparently this is still something of a new idea), whether or not to have lessons on Saturdays and how English should be taught. That last one in particular made an impression on me. I haven't seen many examples over here of hilariously bad English ("Engrish," as the young people say), so I assumed Japan was getting on alright as regards proficiency in this most excellent and heroic choice of language. However, in a recent test measuring English ability in thirty Asian countries, Japan placed 29th (a few others for your information: Singapore 1st, China and Korea tied at 8th). There's as many as 8 years of compulsory English education, with plenty of reading aloud, learning vocab and translation, so where could the difficulty lie?
Well, imagine, for example, if I were to tell you that 傘売り場はどこですか(kasa uriba wa doko desu ka) means "Where is the umbrella department?" You could then say that you know the Japanese for "Where is the umbrella department?" and if anyone were to say Kasa uriba wa doko desu ka to you, you would know what they were asking. But you may not know that は marks the subject of the sentence, that the particle か changes a statement into a question, that です is a polite form non-past tense et cetera et cetera. Upscale this sort of problem to apply to a whole system of education, throw in some lack of practice communicating with native speakers and you have the current situation. Yet what has the government proposed to set this right? More hours of lessons and more vocabulary to be learned. Double-yew very much tee heich. I found this issue surprising as I've always found Japanese to be taught to foreigners very well, and would thought it would be simple enough to follow the same principles in an inverse way.
I suppose I must also mention how my own presentation went. Writing now it seems as if it passed by in a flash, but I remember being nervous of over- or under-running and stuttering and hesitating quite a bit. Perhaps I put too much faith in my powers of improvisation, maybe it would have been better if I'd written a script for my parts so I'd have had something concretely structured to fall back on. Still, no use crying over spilled milk, and others commented that it went quite well, so perhaps I'm just being paranoid. The inescapable fact of the matter is that one more piece of project work is over, roll on whatever comes next!
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