Can I borrow your dictionary?!

Today was my first full day of school - lions and tigers and bears, oh my! This is technically the foreign officer orientation week, so us ferners (4 of us) were introduced to each other yesterday afternoon, and this morning we met up with the other civilians in the class (6 people). We made a visit to the Ministry of Defense, received some briefings, had lunch with our Japanese sponsors and took a tour of the Ministry in the afternoon. My brain hurts already. See the scanned first page that I was hit with during the first briefing - There were 30 more progressively more complex and crowded slides to follow. The instructor essentially read the entire package, with LOTS of requisite molar sucking - that was just the first briefing. The next briefing was better only in that the instructor read faster than the first, and the briefing was over in 40 minutes instead of 60. The PAIN, oh the PAIN.

Good news is that there is one other woman in the class of 47! We spoke briefly today and she's very nice. She is a staffer for the Japanese Parliament. My sponsor is a Japanese Air Force Colonel - excellent English, so he'll be a great resource. He attended the U.S. Air War College a few years ago. The other foreign officers are from France and India. There's one other U.S. Army officer and his Japanese is fantastic - been here for about 12 years off and on. There are supposed to be two other foreign officers coming to join us later - one from Thailand and one from China. It promises to be an interesting and challenging year. Fortunately, the U.S. military has this right - we get excellent language training prior to attending this course - the Indian had 4 months of daily language training, and the French officer had 3 hours a week for the past year - really not enough to even begin to get comfortable with this language.

My head and feet hurt (lots of walking today in pointy and medium heeled shoes), and I need to go do some translating for tomorrow's classes. Wish me luck!

If there are any DLI instructors reading - thank you again for getting us as well prepared as we are. I complain, but I actually understand about 60% of what's going on - the military vocabulary is indispensible.

If there are any DLI pre-NIDS students reading - Cram as much military terminology kanji into your head as possible, and then ask for more!

Ja Mata!