Today is the first day of week-long testing for Kurume High School students. As I walked past their desks in the hallways students were flinging compasses, writing scratchy translations, staring at their thumbs. “Are you ready for exams?” I asked one third-year student. “So-so,” she said.
When I parked my bike this morning a student ran by me. “Good Morning!” she called over her shoulder and then darted behind a building’s corner. Everything’s moving in fast-forward today. The teachers run between classes, dash into the teacher’s room for a stack of papers and then take the stairs two at a time. Larin and I are the only ones in the midst of this chaos moving at a normal Monday speed. I spent the last hour and a half nursing a cup of tea, reading the Japan Times online, waiting for my chance to sneak off to the library and edit a video for Jazz’s fifth graders.
T-Rex Sensei stalks around the office, nervous, he says, because the exam time is so short. His third year students are really between a rock and a hard place because they have public university entrance exams just after New Years. The exams this week are like the appetizer and T-Rex Sensei hopes he’s taught them how to crunch through the listening exercises like the small little samples they are. He literally taps his hands in his desk, impatient, waiting for the bell to ring so he can run upstairs and have his answers.
Two weeks ago I created a pre-exam mock test to give the students an idea of what they’re up against. T-Rex Sensei gave me gave me eight articles and I wrote five true/false questions for each one. The articles don’t come with an instruction booklet or a reference textbook so I’m never really sure if they’re meant to be true, or just meant to be controversial.
One article talked about blood types. It said in the beginning of things when all humans lived in Africa we had type O blood. Meat-eater blood. People with type O now are meant to eat a lot of meat. Pork. Chicken. Beef. Fish. You name it, they digest it well. Gradually people moved away from Africa. In fact, people moved up into Mongolia and eastern Russia and the only meat they had were the cows they dragged along with them. These wanderers, the type B people, discovered milk and cheese. The type O Africans were essentially allergic to milk (and many still are today) so our blood had to develop a different strain to allow for lactose digestion. When I started thinking about it, about how these Asians came across the Bering Straight and down into North American to set up tribes we know as the Crows or the Blackfoot or the Navajo, they brought that un-lactose blood with them. They became blood type A, which is to say they grew quite a lot of their food. Our bodies weren’t originally meant for that, either, and I imagine the first people had quite a difficult time adapting to corn and potatoes and wheat. Then we started mixing and inter-breeding as people do and type AB developed and types B- and A positive and O to the second power. The main point of the article was that based on our blood type we should design oureslves a diet meant specifically for us, meaning the Atkins Diet might work for type O people, but not for AB. A type O person trying to be a vegitarian might have all kinds of weird bowel problems. Our blood types have more to do with what we should eat and less to do with what kind of a lover we are, as the Japanese believe.
We North Americans don’t believe anything strange about blood types as far as I know. In fact, not only do I not know my bloodtype, but I have no idea how to go about finding out. I’m such an underweight weakling that I’m not eligible to donate blood (I passed out once after have five little tubes drawn) so no one has ever labeled a bag of my blood in front of me. The fact is I’d have to gain 25 pounds to even meet the minimum weight requirement. When I was young I went through a bout of lactose intolerance, and now mother has eliminated lactose completely from the Rabbit Slayer’s diet to try and clear up his chronic runny nose. Johnathan’s family, likewise, has heard that they pack blood in citric acid, and since they’ve all got a citric acid allergy circling around in their blood cells [perhaps they are type B--the husband loves milk but gets hives from citrus fruit] they’ve never donated or been transfused. We’re just walking enigmas–if we only knew our blood types perhaps we could figure ourselves out.
Another article I put down as teacher propoganda since it supports the idea that students should get less than eight hours of sleep a night. The “study,” conducted over six years on one million people, “conclusively proves” that people who get more than eight hours of sleep a night will die sooner than those who get only six hours. I asked the class about this–they’re a group of third year English core kids so they’re pretty good–and they laughed. We’re lucky to get four hours of sleep Sensei! We have to study. Wait a minute, I thought, all the sleep research I’ve seen on teenagers needing nine hours of sleep a night, all the sleep studies in the states–they’re all wrong? Yes, they said. Well, I said, what do you think will happen to you if you sleep more than eight hours everynight? They didn’t even hesitate. You’ll DIE!
One downside to being an American is that we don’t get old cultural oddities baked into us–like disease treatments in the 18th century (because our country is so young, not because we don’t have weird thoughts on medicine). Today in the Japan Times there’s an article about the little mushi (bugs) who crawled down nose canals or throats to bring the Japanese disease.
…what’s startling about them is that the mushi are so darned cute! A very bad bug called Kan-mushi, thought to live in the backbone and cause curvature of the spine, looks like an adorable little white dinosaur. The bug responsible for heart disease is depicted as a short-legged pony. Another looks like a child’s drawing of a furry moth, complete with smiley face.
This is the background my students are playing with. Yes, Japan has modern medical facilities, but down in the stomach of all of this I can’t help feeling that they believe it when someone tells them they only need six hours of sleep a night, they think our personalities are determined by our blood types and now, as it cools down, a few teachers, a smattering of students, and some old people I see on the streets have started wearing surgical masks over their nose and mouths “to keep from getting sick” ["once you're sick it's too late for the mask," O Sensei tells me]. Surely washing our hands, taking vitamins, getting plenty of rest and fluids will prevent a cold– or are these our old wives tales in America? Are masks the way to go? But before we follow Japan’s lead and stock our classroom closets with surgical gear I would like to know–what kind of bugs do they think they’re keeping out?
