new teacher profiles

Re-made in Japan

Mar 13, 2008 3:22 PM

Zen, sushi, samurai warriors, anime cartoons, manga comics — as all hip urban kids know, Japanese stuff is too cool.

Now a group of Queens kids are really getting into the Japanese thing, even learning how to speak it and how to read its mysterious, beautiful alphabet, all in David Bantz’s classroom at East West HS of International Studies in Flushing.

“I spent my entire junior year in Tokyo,” said the first-year teacher, who majored in East Asian studies at New York University, “and it changed the way I saw the world, myself, other countries, the way I see home. It made me question everything I had ever taken for granted up until then.

“I learned the expression shou ga nai, ‘it can’t be helped,’ meaning that some things are out of our control, and it’s sort of a release from being plagued by anxiety, guilt, regret and frustration. I learned that there’s a Japanese tendency — I don’t want to overgeneralize, but there is a certain tendency to let things be.”

Bantz said that, in the United States, it’s easy to overanalyze and get upset by things one cannot control.

“It’s difficult to explain, but the biggest impact living in Japan had on me has been in interpersonal relations, and in learning the value of saying less than saying more,” Bantz said.

When the Queens native was a student at Francis Lewis HS he chose Japanese as his language course, mostly out of curiosity. It came naturally to him and he enjoyed it, “but it took a few years before it turned into an interest and then a passion,” he said.

After his year in Japan as a college junior, the country’s way of life so intrigued him that he decided to return after graduation. Bantz lived there for four years, teaching English in public school for two of those years.

“I learned a lot from the teachers I saw in Japan,” Bantz said. “I’ll never be Japanese but when I’m giving a language course, when I’m speaking Japanese, my demeanor changes a bit from what it would be in other situations; I sort of become Japanese. There’s a certain flavor evident in my classroom that’s influenced by my time in Japan.”

Did Bantz get a big dose of re-entry shock when he left a Japanese classroom to teach in an American one?

“Everyone has an image of well-behaved kids in Japan, and much of that is true, but I think my kids are well behaved, too,” Bantz said. “I love my kids, I don’t get any trouble from them. To me kids are kids.”

What’s different, he said, is that in Japan education is standardized and there’s pressure on students to develop strong study skills and to take it upon oneself to do a lot of study outside of school.

“But here the expectations vary so tremendously among individual students, families, parents, society in general,” Bantz said. “There are some books telling us homework should be abolished and others calling for more homework. There’s no clear message. The Japanese way is different, not necessarily better, just very, very different.”

What is better about Japanese culture is the food, as far as Bantz is concerned.

“I love to eat and cook Japanese food,” he said. “It really allows you an insight into the culture. The traditional foods are so simple and understated. The Japanese interpretations of Western food are usually in my opinion an improvement over the original.”

One of Bantz’s favorite things to do is eat pasta, meat loaf and lasagna in Japan, which he aspires to do this year. It’s been two-and-a-half years since he’s been back to his adopted country, and his goal is to return once a year. Bantz would love to be able to take his students who, he says, are so motivated to study Japanese that it increases his own motivation and energy.

In the meantime, he’d settle for a kitchen in the school where he and his kids could cook Japanese food together.