Humid and sad

T-Rex Sensei has another frog in his throat. This morning, while I was pouring myself tea, he tapped me on the shoulder and wished me a good morning. When I wished it back he told me he couldn’t talk because of the frog.

“You mean your voice is hoarse,” I said.

“Yes, it’s a frog,” he said.

He strapped a white cotton mask over his jaw this afternoon, and just now as I returned debate papers to Green Tea Sensei, I saw his huge body hunched over his desk, his face buried in a pile of papers. It’s a little disconcerting when the person usually stalking angrily around the teacher’s room is getting his eyebrows penciled in with wayward pen scratches, just because he couldn’t wait until he got home to take a nap. The Big Kahuness, in a lime green shirt, looks on unfazed. We all conduct our business openly–the phone calls, the mid-afternoon catnaps, reading novels–because there is nowhere to hide this business. If you’re the kind of messy person that I am then the guts of your desk are perpetually unstuffed and on on display. The pink binder the color of a healthy stomach shoved roughly next to the “Write to the Point” textbook. Your pens strewn across the desk like ribs protecting the exam papers inside.

I’m watching my students age before my eyes these days. Ryosuke, the debate master, threw his back out bowing to us in class this afternoon. “I can join your team,” he said to Gonzo Sensei and I after class, hobbling down the aisle back to his regular desk. “You have an old person’s disease,” Gonzo Sensei said, and the class laughed. “We all have an old person’s disease. The kind where you sneeze and then you can’t walk.”

He did look like an old man, suddenly, clutching his lumbar spine, his upper back frozen at a 45 degree angle. The boys wear polyester-looking pants, just those you’d see on a man playing chess in the park, and his white shirt was partially untucked, possibly because he hadn’t the mobility to tidy himself up.

He and T-Rex Sensei aren’t the only ones falling apart lately. Junki, a 2-1 student, surprised me at lunch the other day, and I knocked my water bottle over onto my keyboard. My old computer gurgled, turned purple, and shut down. I tried to power her back up later in the afternoon, but I didn’t get so much as a murmur. On Johnathan’s advice, I stretched the already snapped spine open and laid the computer horizontal on my desk, to give the water a chance to leak out of the speakers. When I left for the afternoon–after speech practice–I left the lid hoping, hoping the water would be sucked out by the rattling, dry rasp of the air conditioner that sits over my desk. Whatever the reason, it turned on this morning. I’d spent the whole bike ride home last night coming to peace with the resolution and closure a broken computer in my last month was supposed to mean. I’d written most of the the Kyushu Chronicles on there, it had gotten me through the boring days of final exams, when I opened it a group picture of the 2-1 class smiled out at me–but maybe no longer. And then it turned on. So symbolism went out the window. Instead I have the internet for the month of July.

I’m about halfway done with the 3-1 Superhero cards. Now that I’ve finished the debate exams for the 2-1 class, I’ll turn my attentions to the bright pink markers and green cards that make up the pile remaining to be written. It’s surprisingly cathartic, saying good-bye in this way to each of the students. It would be a really peaceful way to spend an afternoon except the air conditioner above me is humming at this awful high-pitched level. Even with headphones, it’s reaching into my inner ears and batting my eardrums. It’s like being in an MRI machine for hours.

Oh yeah, did I mention I had a series of MRIs in Japan? They went in scanning for a slippery spine or any bones that are getting too buddy-buddy and fusing together. The process was really quite easy. I was interviewed by a nurse in a powder blue uniform (complete with an old-fashioned nurse’s hat bobby pinned to the crown of her head) about my medical history, if I had any babies, if I had any metal in my body. She took my blood pressure with an old mercury machine, and then sent me out to wait with the old people who gave me the evil eye. When the time came for the MRI I climbed onto the table, squished in some earplugs, and 30 minutes later I was done! Walking out of the clinic with a series of films wrapped in a tinfoil envelope. I will be going to the back specialist this afternoon so he can give me a 30 second evaluation. Now I just have to figure out if I can take MRI films onto the plane. Are they safe to go through the x-ray machine? Will this zap off the scary pictures of my meaty spine?

They’ve now brought the handyman down and he’s on his tiptoes on the table under the windows, tinkering with the air conditioner. It has flapped open, and he’s removing a white cylinder with a rotating wheel inside. It’s mostly interesting because one of the office ladies came down and after I accidentally hit her in the side when I stretched my arms over my head, she came over and RUBBED MY SHOULDERS. I’ll take a little squeaky air conditioner any day if it comes with a massage.

Although I won’t take NO air conditioner because it is now July, the rainy season is over, and it is HOT. Not only hot, but so humid it feels like my skin has turned into sticky tape. Even the orchids on The Happy Cook’s desk are drooping. Perhaps the reason we put up with the squeaky AC for so long is that none of us can imagine life without it. Things may be falling apart, but we’re not quite ready for them to completely unravel.

Which is exactly how I feel about leaving in three weeks. I’m working on the cards, I’m making CDs of pictures of the Superhero class, but I’m not quite ready for The Big Farewell. For now, the fact that I’m leaving is like the big elephant in the room, the squeaky AC, that no one wants to deal with just yet. Because life on the other side is humid and sad.

The issue of garbage

It’s not as though things haven’t been happening around here. Gregory Peck Sensei announced my farewell party to the staff room, I spent last weekend on a cluster of islands made famous by things like The Secret Christian Museum and octopus drying by the side of the road, and an old student, Ayumi, dropped by yesterday to interview a foreigner for a school assignment. She will write her paper in Japanese, but just to show that she’d learned something from high school, she wrote all her notes in English. She asked what has been difficult about Japan? What has been easy? And then the question that I stewed on all day: what have I not been able to adapt to?

Japan, I would say, is not a hard country to adapt to. It’s a hard country to really know, but it’s an easy place to live. Little children shout “hello”! on the street, you can buy fish and fruit at any grocery store, and generally a smile and a wink will get you pretty far. There have been certain exceptions: the driver’s exam being number on on that list, but overall no one tries to take advantage of you, no one steals your money belt, and there is indoor plumbing in every building.

What I didn’t notice, and what took me by surprise, was that I found my personality to be surprisingly, shall we say, flexible. I’d always been under the impression that we grew up and the chemistry set of our hearts decided we’d have a temper or a snappy tongue or a propensity toward laziness. And then if you’re thrown in with the Japanese jellyfish or the bears in Montana, you’re going to either be the person who whips out a revolver or the person who drops to the ground and covers their neck. “Japanese people often fall into two groups,” I tell Ayumi, “those who want to learn English and those who don’t have time for a foreigner to stumble around in Japanese.”

But I’ve found myself adapting to everything: The Big Kahuness’ rules, the schedule, the diplomatically indirect way people speak to each other. I bow. What is interesting to me about this is not that I’ve picked up the mannerisms of The Sensei, but that even though speaking directly is considered rude, and I’ve untied the wires in my brain that force me to do this, I want it back. And I want it back badly. The trouble for me is that there is no easy way to do this in Japan. Or at least I don’t know how. Are there really only two options for me: cutting my losses and being a part of the group or being that person who refuses to pay the tea fee every month?

Yesterday, T-Rex Sensei, who is in charge of the cleaning brigade, told Praju, “maybe you don’t know this, but please do no throw personal garbage into your garbage can. You must take this home.” After finally rescuing our small red can from the clutches of the vice-vice-principal, we’d filled it with banana peels and nut shells and yogurt containers. I’ve been doing this for almost two years, and every afternoon the students dump it into the big garbage sack and take it out to the incinerator pile. I guess I was a little riled up after yesterday’s interview with Ayumi because when Praju told me that we have to take our grape stems and used kleenexes home with us, I balked.

“No,” I said, “I will not do that. I am putting my foot down.”

Perhaps too many opportunities such as this have already passed me by, and I’m feeling that I’ve been swept up in the wave of Japanese cooperation. What I really feel is that it’s a situation that I would usually give in to. I would take a sack of old peach pits and moldy cherry skins home every afternoon. I would put only crumpled notes in the red garbage can; the occasional discarded extra homework assignment. In a week, in a month, this would just be another habit, something to laugh about when I hand Johnathan my sack at 4:30. The point I’m trying to make is that: it’s not a big deal. But when Ayumi asked me if there was anything I couldn’t adapt to I realized that I’d somehow adapted to everything. I get a little riled up when my plans are thwarted, or when a kink is thrown into the schedule, such as an extra Oral Communication class today, but I’m not the blustery blunt person I once was. I go with the flow.

And you know what I’ve realized? This makes me very boring. There is no sizzle. I’m not having meetings with T-Rex Sensei on the side. I have no grand stories of shouting at students. Instead of putting my foot down about the garbage issue I’m wondering what I should do. I’m thinking about things from both sides. This makes me very diplomatic. How do I explain that carting my garbage home is a little humiliating, a little nomadic? Or, more importantly, can someone explain to me why we do this?

What I wish I could tell Ayumi today is that I didn’t know NOT adapting was an option. I wasn’t aware I had a choice to make, and that somewhere in the tumble of months I’ve been here, I made one. Was it possible for me to simply choose to tell people, “yes, no, you’re wrong,” instead of, “maybe, let’s see, hmmmm…”? And if I did, what would the consequences be? I’ve been here for two years, and I feel like I’m only beginning to learn how to be myself in the world of the Senseis.

Metabolic Syndrome

The fire alarm goes off at lunchtime and the students don’t react. The Sensei stand in the hallway, ears cocked toward the first floor, hands on hips. The Big Kahuness walks past with a folder. She hangs out near the Principal’s door. Everyone shrugs. A mechanical voice periodically announces: THERE IS A FIRE ON THE FIRST FLOOR. FIRST FLOOR. Finally, the grass cutter from the front office runs down the hallway in a blue jumpsuit. “Malfunction!” he shouts, and then sprints up the stairs.

Praju and I head to the third-year student Superhero class for lunchtime, and we ask if they heard it. “It was so loud,” they said. “Annoying.” Arisa is passing around a Minnie Mouse tin her private English teacher gave her. “It was expensive,” she says, “600 yen.” She counts out the candies inside, looking at Praju and I out of the corner of her eye. “None for us,” I say, biting a piece of raw carrot. Arisa looks relieved.

Sayaka makes a face. “Raw carrot?” she asks. “Raw?”

I try to offer her a piece, but she shakes her head. “It’s good for your eyes,” I say.

“Never,” she says, “I never eat that.”

The third year students have not pushed their desks together. There is no lunch sharing going on. Kohei and Shiori are listening to music with old headphones. Three of the girls sit and chat. Everyone else sits primly at their desks, books opened, a finger tracing the grammar point. With their left hands they catch pieces of meat with their chopsticks and lift it to their mouths without once glancing at the food. We’re sitting at the desks of two girls who are absent for the day, and I lean back in my chair and observe.

Across the courtyard, I can see the two floors of first and second year students. Down on the ground floor the Sensei are crouched near the study desks, helping students prepare for the exams Friday. Because of the way the light hits the buildings, we can’t usually see into the third year students classrooms. They’re up on the second floor, and often they have the blinds drawn. But from this side of the building, I can see everything. The first year students on the way to the bathroom, the second year students changing into their P.E. uniforms. The school already feels distant, which I suppose is part of the purpose of moving the third years away. This is their transitory year where they stop going to clubs, start studying seriously. “It’s this time of year,” Gonzo Sensei says when I tell her how quiet they were at lunchtime, “it’s that part of the building at this time of year.”

I feel a bit like I’m watching a student ant farm, like I’m a voyeur hanging out in the branches of the maple tree that taps at the hallway windows. I’m obscured by leaves and the blinds that Sayaka keeps lowering, trying to keep the sun out of people’s eyes. It’s a little dizzying, seeing one’s educational process physically laddered up like this. The move up the flight of stairs from first to second year, and then the move across the courtyard, into the clouds, the third year. Everyday, looking out the windows of the 3-1 classroom, they see exactly where they came from.

Their English mistakes are becoming more sophisticated, less the sloppy translations we see in the first and second year students. They’re occasionally confused about prepositions and transitions, but they have a solid grasp of grammar. Gonzo Sensei throws around Japanese explanations when they cock their heads to the side, confused, and I listen to her explain subject, verb, object, when the combination is jumbled. “I love English grammar,” I whisper to her as the students turn their desk to face the back chalkboard. “We should make them memorize that and repeat it,” she says. “Everyday, ‘I love English grammar!'”

In the afternoon, Praju corrects 2-1 test papers. “Have you heard of this ‘metabolic syndrome’?” she asks me and we call over Gregory Peck Sensei to explain.

“It means,” he says, “when we see someone becoming fat. If we see a woman with a waist more than 36 inches, or a man with a waist more than 34 inches, we say they have metabolic syndrome. Fat stomach.”

“Wait,” we ask, “a man’s waist should be smaller than a woman’s?”

“It sounds weird, isn’t it?” Gregory Peck Sensei says. “I’m very, very against it.”

Even though they’re supposed to be writing about America’s dependency on cars, the 2-1 students can’t get food off their minds:

In America, there are many non healthy foods. For example, humbergers, potato chips, fried chickens and burned beafs. They give damage our health.

I know this much: anyone who eats a burned beafs is definitely going to do damage to their health.

During lunchtime we see Akihiko leaning back in his chair, chatting with our old debate student Mio. Her laugh is loud and full of happy, crooked teeth. Ryosuke studies quietly behind them. Yuki, the red team’s dance captain, puts in her contacts using a small pink case that has a built-in mirror. Akari folds a microscopic, bright blue paper crane. She sets it on the teacher’s podium and walks away. The girls all appear to be letting their hair grow, and most of them have it swinging long and black over their studying shoulders. Come fifth period, it will be tied back with ribbons and clips. After chatting with us about raw carrots, the conversation turns to T-Rex Sensei’s class. He translates everything for Praju, and the students are insulted. For her because they know she understands Japanese. And for themselves because they understand the English. “I say, ‘why’?” Arisa says, shrugging.

“What do I tell him?” Praju and I whisper later. “How can I tell him to stop everything?”

“We think the class is useful,” Arisa says, after some prompting, “but if I have time I want to really memorize sentences. I don’t have such time.” With that, she sweeps her empty lunchbox, two Micky Mouse cases and her chopsticks into a paper bag from a lingerie store, hooks them onto her desk, and arranges herself for fifth period. The bell rings and I walk to the front of the classroom, pick up a piece of yellow chalk, and get ready to be a Sensei again.

Study longer, sleep less

As we’re leaving class second period, I peek over at Gonzo Sensei’s stack of papers and see a series of graphs with the students’ names scrawled across the top. The students are required to turn in a weekly schedule of how they’ve spent their time; it’s recorded by the hour. Some of them are color-coded: purple for studying, pink for homework. They each add up the key totals in boxes at the end. An average of 5.5 hours of sleep a night. Seven on Saturday.

Gonzo Sensei looks down at the stack. “In Japan,” she says, flipping through them, “the teachers take responsibility for so many things.”

“Why do you have them write these?” I ask. “What’s the purpose behind it?”

“Seemingly,” Gonzo Sensei says, “it’s to check whether they’re having too much study. Or if they’re having too much homework to do.”

“In reality?” I ask.

“In reality,” she says, “it’s like, ‘why are you only studying 30 minutes every night!’ It’s the mentality of Kurume Koko. We must work hard!”

It reminds me of something out of a movie about the Iditarod I used to watch in the days when I was saving my fifth grade allowance to return (on my own) to Alaska. “You have to run longer, sleep less,” the Native American coach says, “It’s your only chance.” I’m already sleeping less, either from the cats and dogs its raining or my own restless mind.

I’ve been paying careful attention lately to school procedure. Each homeroom has a book that a student is selected to write in each day. They record the events of the day, homework given, absences and whatever else they’d like. There are 21 of these books floating around the school in someone’s blue bag, but what I wonder is: what happens to them after this year? Is there a library of meticulously recorded daily journals? Also, what happens to the 243 panels each color block (times 3) uses during Sports Day? Is there a warehouse full of red cardboard squares? Usually, during exam time, there is an Edo-style black sign hanging from the teacher’s room door that says NO STUDENTS ALLOWED. But this time there’s just a laminated white sheet. Was the Edo sign destroyed in the flood? Is someone hiding it in their desk? Also, what is the new vice-principal curly-haired woman as strict as everyone says she is? Ms. Delicious made Praju sneak in after her when they went to lunch a few weeks ago, just so The Big Kahuness wouldn’t catch on.

And perhaps most important of all: what happened to my red garbage can? The last thing I knew it was catching water leaking out of the light fixture over my desk. Now it is not underfoot, not in place for me to jettison my yogurt lid. Did it take this opportunity to go AWOL? Does it have a better post at another Sensei’s desk? Did they steal it?

Have you ever lost a useful piece of office equipment in a flood and then wondered if The Mad Scientist secretly stole it out from under your nose? Do tell.

40 days and 40 nights

Two of the younger teachers webbed a half dozen pieces of string from the teacher’s room to the windows across the hallway, and draped hundreds of dingy white washcloths across the strands. We duck under then on the way to the teacher’s room door in the morning. From down the hallway, they look like prayer flags. The walls near my desk are water-streaked a light cream zebra stripe. Praju spends all morning cleaning wet chalk residue out of her desk drawers. I sort out the power cords and Ethernet cables that we left to dry on the physics teacher’s desk. Outside the teacher’s room is a new, blocky sign that reads: DO NOT FLUSH WATER BOTTLES DOWN THE TOILET.

Because if you flush water bottles down the toilet, you will flood the teacher’s room. A pipe will become blocked and instead of funneling the rain from one side of the school to the other, water will drip out of the fluorescent lights and leak out of the seams in the ceiling, so that the teacher’s room will feel like a shimmering mirage. Full of computers. And other electronic appliances that go fizz! Bang! And you’re dead in the water.

Yesterday morning Praju and I braved the typhoon-like conditions to rocket the little car to school. We floated through puddles and whipped the rain off the windows and kept looking at the clock, worrying about being late. We ran inside, umbrellas flapping, and marked our way from the entrance to the teacher’s room with wet footprints. We slid open the door. Inside, instead of copiers awhirling and tea abrewing and bright lights! Big city! to welcome us, there were three shirt-less male teachers scooping up puddles of water with dustpans.

Our desks had been pushed to the far side of the room, up against the leaking windows, but far enough away from the eroding pillars in the center of the room to keep my computer dry. The story we’ve been told is that before the early morning class Gregory Peck Sensei noticed the walls were about to give way under a build-up of pressure, and so he casually pushed a few desks to the side. Praju’s ended up under one of the leaking ceiling tiles, and so her pile of old newspaper clippings and uncorrected essays is now one sopping wet mess. We hip-hopped our way through the drizzle to our desks where we rescued what we needed. It turns out all I really care about is my computer and my journals. If the rest of it had been swept away into the hole in the floor where we dumped all the water, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

The new vice principal found a megaphone left over from Sports Day and asked the teachers to congregate in the hallway for the morning meeting. The Music Man, hounds tooth pants rolled up to the knees, afraid to leave the room unattended, set out a fleet of buckets to catch new drips. “We will have a normal schedule,” she said, as sky grumbled and copy machine filled up with water. “Sensei, please check the students made it safely to school.”

Those of us not teaching in the first period headed back into the fray. A few large squeegee brushes were found in an old broom closet, and we used these to push the water toward the hallway. Then, the maintenance man came running up with a shovel and a hammer and he pried open a four-foot square hole in the floor next to the vice- principal’s desk. It was full of murky water and a few bright blue cords that hummed in the water like electric eels. The Sensei squeezed out washcloths, packed them around the desks like sandbags, and pushed water in this channel all the way to the huge hole. The male P.E. teachers, still shirt-less, carried buckets of dirty water to the courtyard’s garden, where they dumped them into the bushes. I walked around the room unplugging every computer, Ethernet and other cable I could find, trying to keep us all from being electrocuted. And so we toiled, in the dark room, until the rain started to let up.

I had class for the next two periods, and I looked a little bedraggled. “Why is your hair so wet? The students would ask and I’d tell them a little about the process of flood-cleanup, and how the wood floors in the teacher’s room were getting the best cleaning of their lives. Eventually I went back down to the teacher’s room where they’d tacked up blue tarps over a third of the room in such an elaborate way that any caught drips would be funneled down to the base of a few potted plants. If I weaved and limbered myself up just so, I could make it to my desk where I was shrouded in a bright blue light reflecting off the tarps strung around me like a tent. A few Sensei moved their desks out to the hallway where they conducted business like shipwreck survivors, in a sea of drying chairs with the washcloths for sails.

Then, after English club, all the desks were moved back and book stacks restored and aside from the still gaping hole in the floor (which now showed only wet dirt), the room looked back to normal. The blue tarps were disassembled and packed. The potted plants were set up around the tea station. Someone plugged in the microwave. The lights were popped back into place and turned on. Permanent damage seems to have been done to the copy machine, which is covered in a sheet of clear plastic, its inky belly open and showing what it’s made of.

I’ve been Internet-less all morning, which I’d assumed was a result of someone being afraid to flip a still-wet switch. As it turns out, one of the black cables I unplugged powers the Internet for our entire block of teachers, and when I re-assembled, I just set it to the side, unsure what it was for. Just another case where trying to prevent people from being electrocuted only fouls up the regular routine.

Switch your minds

It should come as no surprise to you that the blue team won Sports Day. As it turns out, they have all the track stars. The students are divided evenly and randomly, but there is no weight (or counter-weight) given for track prowess, and so “randomly”, all the good track runners ended up on the blue team. Which would explain why, at the end of every race, the blue-banded kids were breaking through the finishing tape. And also why the blue team seemed so enthusiastic in practice. That *was* their version of laziness. Oh, what must it be like to have hamstrings of steel?

The third year students were happy to see me again. The pressure of translation and vocabulary was lifted off their shoulders and carried away in the rain clouds on Thursday afternoon, and they smiled and put a yellow robe on me and posed for funny pictures. They squealed my name when I wandered over to where they were changing under a small grove of pines. When the boys came out bare-chested for camel wars, the girls on their team danced and cheered for them, and I crouched on the ground and listened to them chanting “yellow! yellow!” on one side, and the boys grunting and tussling in the dirt on the other.

It turned out to be an emotional day for me, even though I hadn’t felt it sneaking up on me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to hunch down in the dirt next to the huge tug-of-war rope and take pictures on the continuous mode. I wandered back behind the bleachers and took photos of the Red team’s legs spread across the metal seats like rays of the sun. I got pictures of the blue team before their folk dance, all trussed up with mickey mouse ears. Dragon robes flapped. Boys pounded the taiko drum. All 243 students in each block’s bleachers cheered and sang the school song.

And I lurked about the event like a strange-looking paparazzi. I sat down in the first row of the red team, used one of their panels to hide my yellow t-shirt, and listened to their good-bye speeches. The leaders thanked the students for their hard work, applauded for Kouhei, who won the cheering dance for them, and then passed on the reigns. They told the second year students to crane their necks around to see the yellow team’s back panel (a mishmash of tree branches and kabuki heads with a killer paint job). “Study it,” they instructed. “It won this year. Try to figure out why so you can do it for the red team next year.” Everyone cried. The girls passed the faulty megaphone from one to the other with slippery hands. The boys tried to hide their eyes with their red headbands. In the background, The Senseis ripped down tents and yanked out the wires of the sound system.

At the end of the day everyone gathered back in the arena where they squatted by class. Navy slippers to one side, red on the other, turquoise in the middle. The teachers paced back and forth in the fading light, the flagpole’s shadows striping their backs, and told them it was time to switch their minds. “Do not go to parties tonight,” they said, “it’s time to get back to studying.”

“But we’re going to a teacher’s party,” I whispered to O Sensei, “isn’t this a little hypocritical?”

“They must know,” she said, “that the fun is over. The most important thing is that they learn to switch their minds.”

I can’t say for sure if this worked or not. I didn’t see the kids again until this morning. In my fourth period class they were clammy and drooping like old tulips. But the mood has definitely shifted. No longer do I come to school in track pants a red t-shirt with Coca-Cola written on it in Japanese. No longer have the students been illegally practicing in the park after dark. We have two weeks until final exams, and the third-year students have business to be done. The Sensei are running exam papers off the mimeograph machines that whirl like a steam press. The men are wearing collared shirts and muted ties. I haven’t seen a dragon robe in what feels like ages.

An inappropriate use of English

I’ve been thinking a lot, of late, about my two years in Japan and all the cleaning times I’ve attended. Literally hundreds of cleaning times. Sweeping the English room, wiping the windows with old New York Times articles, scrubbing graffiti off desks that says “Off Cou”. Today is the mother of all cleaning times. We’re hauling our chairs, on our heads, out to the arena, so that our parents and friends have a place to sit that isn’t squatting on their haunches in the dirt. We’ve set up tents around the arena. Emblazoned across their flapping canvas is KURUME HIGH SCHOOL in bold black letters. We’ve drawn chalk lines in the sand and raked leaves leftover from the fall and dug out a queen ant from a mangle of tree roots.

The boys have their polo shirts rolled up at the sleeves. The girls have Sesame Street towels around their necks. We’re all carrying brooms made of strands of straw, so we look like a pack of witches about to take flight. In the corner of the parking lot that the 2-1 class is sent to clean, we find a small black cocoon, a patch of four-leaf clover and a spider camoflaged against tree bark. Everyone is getting tan.

They keep asking if we have cleaning time in America, and I keep saying no. When I look at the way the troops here are divided and sent to conquer the weeds I have to wonder why we don’t employ a 1,000 person cleaning force for 15 minutes a day. Here, the baseball and rugby teams set up tents. The soccer and track and field teams rake the arena. The judo team sets up the judge’s seats. And the rest of us as strategically scattered around the school grounds. Fifteen of us under the Japanese pine trees growing in the circular driveway. 20 of us weeding the palm trees. A few of us mulling dirt behind the field. A handful carting around green nets to section off the brass band.

Behind us, three students for each color are monitoring the back panels. The 3-man construction crew that will screw them in place 30 feet in the air has yet to arrive, and so the girls point out minor flaws. Was that line supposed to be red? Should be dab a bit of gold paint here? I wander over and ask what the kanji mean. The red team’s is especially difficult. It means, “the line behind a tire track,” they finally tell me. They tell me slowly in Japanese and I throw out English phrases. “It’s a very Japanese meaning,” I keep saying, “how can this one word mean all of these things?” We finally decided it means, “we break trail”, and I wander off to take a picture of the 3-1 Superhero girls lounging on tires under a leafy tree

The blue team’s back panel is, on one side, a stylized Japanese wave, a replica of a famous woodblock painting. On the other side they have Mount Fuji. And in between are two samurai, swords akimbo, one of them leaping off the mountain. Flower petals float across the blue background. The designer and chief paint technician is one of my favorite students, Ayako. She’s from the Superhero class, and has also been my translator in flower arranging and tea ceremony. It strikes me, as I look at the back panel she’s designed, that these really reflect the mood the lead artist each year. She’s a traditionalist. She’s learning to appreciate the way of the flower and the way of the tea.

In the teacher’s room, Gregory Peck Sensei leans back in his chair so he can see me a few desks down. “Tomorrow will be fine?” he asks. [The English teachers have been asking this all day, perhaps as a backlash against T-Rex Sensei who keeps telling them this is an inappropriate use of English. “Don’t say, ‘it is fine,'” I hear him telling The Young Sensei this morning as we watch the card flipping, “Say, ‘It is a nice day.'” And then he twirls around in his seat to ask Green Tea Sensei, “Did you hear what I just told him?”]

“My weather says no rain,” I say. “Fingers crossed.”

“That is your way,” Gregory Peck Sensei says. “Our way is…we don’t have a way.”

We laugh, and then it hits him. “Ah,” he says, “we do this.” He presses his palms together and shakes them at the sky.

“Please, god?” I ask, because I’ve seen students doing this–at debate, at sports matches.

Praju walks up to her desk at this moment and Gregory Peck Sensei says, “Yes, please God. Or,” and here he points his hands at Praju, “Namaste.“

Sports Day practice

Blue Block

The blue team–or block as they’re called–is playing to win. This morning in the costume-less dress rehearsal the students are doing a mock run of all the races. Every 10 minutes a new starting gun goes off, a new Japanese pop song comes on the speakers, and a group of relay-runners jogs around the track. Except for the members of the blue team. They’ve clearly been told, in no uncertain terms, that this is not a slacker’s practice. They’re running as fast as they can. During the race where two boys carry a girl in a small bamboo swing, the blue team leaps ahead and stays that way through all eight legs of the race. The student announcers all but say, “well, the blue team is in the lead again.” When someone really needs to say, woa, blue team, chill out.

I think their interest was piqued this morning when they had to hand over the trophy and plaques from last year’s Sports Day. They’ve had those in their “possession” (and by possession I mean in the school’s trophy case) for the last year. They have a reputation to protect.

The blue and yellow girls come out for a 300-person tug of war. I can hear the yellow team laughing. The blue girls grunt and yank. They’ve got game. They’ve placed a dozen stalwart third-year girls at the end of the line, and they heave and ho on that rope. The blue team wins.

The boys line up for the centipede race. They stand single-file in one direction, lean forward and grasp the hand of the person in front of them. Through that person’s legs. Then they march backwards, with the last person in line laying down. The red team clearly has coordination issues, and the first year boys keep sitting on each other’s faces or stepping on each other’s shoulders. Several times the chain breaks and they must pause, regroup, and start again. It seems a given that the yellow team will win this practice race. They’re centipeding smoothly backwards, but when they get to the end where the last person leaps up and starts the chain in reverse, they fall apart. The blue team, on the far side of the arena, appears magically out of the mist of arms and legs and light rain. They are the slow and steady turtle. They’re speeding to the finish line. They win.

A dozen blue team leaders, with megaphones and whistles, stand in front of the blue block. They’re leading the students in a clapping cheer. On the other two stands the yellow and red teams lounge about, talking. During a particularly exciting race–when a yellow or red member outruns a blue–they hoot and cheer.

Now, the students are doing a folk dance to old 80’s music. They stand in circles, clapping, then link arms and swing each other around. This is an event that gets big points, and so the blue team is standing off to the side, watching their competitors, trying to figure out their flaws.

We are fired up

The blue team is throwing up its arms outside the window, casting shadows in the arena. I can’t see the red team because Nurse Funny Skirt’s tent is in my way, but I can hear them yelling, “crab! crab! crab! crab!”–their color mascot. The yellow team–my team–seems totally disorganized. I see flashes of yellow and white, but they’re practicing neither their cheering or the dance. Perhaps they’re all just really fast relay runners and we’ll make up the points at the races. Or, yellow team, as Kana said this morning in class, “Let’s get fired up!”

The weather has been totally bizarre today and so it’s cloudy one minute and then papers blow off the window sill and people’s hats float away in the breeze, and then it’s sunny and we’re lathering on the sunscreen. Saki, the reluctant English club leader, is standing in the middle of the arena, yelling at the top of her lungs in front of the whole school. This is the girl who cried when I asked her to give directions to six students. One more thing about English club that is funny: we have an English club leader, a third year student, and yet the third year students aren’t allowed to come to clubs. So this year we have two de-facto second year students who do all the work without any of the recognition. But I know when the time comes to pass the torch neither of them will want the title. There will be tears. I just don’t GET it.

Sports Day practice is like watching high-speed yoga. Mountain pose! Triangle! Warrior! all to a really fast drum beat. It’s a fluid, but completely blocky dance. There’s a lot of screaming and punching one’s fist into the air. Behind them, the students flipping panels are just getting into the swing of things. Their kanji, written over 20 people, six rows deep, is sloppy. They need to get a little crispness into their wrist action. And that’s my professional opinion.

We’ve been having classes only in the mornings, and so yesterday I regaled the Natural English class with my stories of getting my Japanese driver’s license. “And then I failed for not moving the steering wheel to the right place, and then I failed for not moving to the left side of the left lane 30 feet before a turn, and then I failed for not looking under the car,” I sad.

Green Tea Sensei, hovering on the side of our circle (She refuses to sit down, claiming it makes her tired) said, “You should write a book!”

All in good time.

Then, today, we told the debate students that we were bringing out evaluation sheets and they needed to BRING IT to get everything checked off. Speech long enough? Cross-examination convincing? And if they didn’t meet all the requirements they had to just keep debating forever until they died.

“We’ll tell you what you did wrong,” I said, “and then we want you to fix it. And if you don’t fix it then your team will have to keep debating until you do fix it.”

“Kind of like you and the driving test?” Green Tea Sensei quipped from the back of the classroom.

Oh, you cool drink of water.

My wardrobe is slowly migrating to my locker at school. For Sports Day practice in the afternoons we all change from our pleated pants and linen shirts into track suits and sweatshirts. Even though The Sensei don’t do anything besides monitor the students’ health. We stand around while they march and stretch, and then we all go back inside to our computers. Yesterday, Gregory Peck Sensei, standing next to Praju and I, asked if we had put on sunscreen. “We forgot,” we both said, “but it’s not even sunny.”

“But for women,” Gregory Peck Sensei said, “this is impossible!”

Praju and I were both squinting in the afternoon light, having left our sunglasses at home. Next to us, the female teachers wore boat hats and long-sleeved track jackets and white gloves. Only our arms were bare to the piercing cloud-covered sun.

I’ve been hanging my shirts and pants in my locker at school, and then I simply wear my Sports clothes home. The result is that come July, when we’re packing odds and ends and sending boxes home by the carton, I’m going to clean out my locker at school and instead of finding an old bottle of contact solution and a black blazer–what’s usually in there–it’s going to be stuffed with capri pants and black linen and polo shirts.