This afternoon the students marched around the arena for an hour while the Sensei stood on platforms, criticizing them. Praju and I stood on the side, breathing in the dust kicked up by their high-stepping march. The band played a jazzy number, led by a student conductor, and the male student leader of Sports Day used a microphone to shout directions. After one pass a P.E. teacher asked them all to sit down and he launched into guilt-tripalooza. “Third year students,” he said, “this is your last Sports Day. You’re supposed to be setting a good example.” The third year students shifted around in the tawny dirt, getting streaks on their navy shorts. They look small–much smaller than the third years last year–and even compared to the turquoise-shorted second year students and red-shorted first year students, they appear to be the shortest class. And yet they’re running around with whistles strung around their necks and megaphones within arms reach.
I’ve been surprised by the turn I’ve seen in the new third year students. Just this February they were my Superhero class, writing stories about a funny incident in their lives. But then somewhere between sitting quietly at graduation while the band played the Land Before Theme Song and Sports Day, they’ve turned into 18-year-olds who are too cool for a foreign teacher. They still like me, and smile at me and give me little waves, but they don’t fawn over me like the second year students or scream my name when I see them in the hallways. They have a singular vision: entrance examinations. It sounds a little conceited that I view them based on how they view me, and that I’m disappointed I don’t get more attention from them. The truth is they’ve moved house and we don’t walk in the same halls anymore. When I go to their classroom at lunchtimes with an announcement they are hunched over their English textbooks, cramming for a test fifth period. I feel like I’ve walked into a morgue.
Then, they pulled on the skin of Sports Day leaders as though it was something hanging in the back of their closet all this time. They’re holding maps for the panel flipping, they’re coaching each other on how to swing their arms. One of them is at the taiko drum, teaching an apprentice how to hit it in the middle, hit it on the sides. I see them after school taping together panels that will flash yellow and red and black. They’re the masterminds behind the big back panels that in the past have had dragons and samurai and koi fish. When I catch them with the scope of my zoom lense they’re not playful and cheering together. They’re staring hard at the field, trying to figure out if everything is going as it should. They’ve moved from bystanders to active participants. They’re not just Sports Day students anymore. They are the Sensei.
In that way I feel a new bond with them. I like to watch them conference in small groups of three or four and then shout instructions into a microphone. Outside the teacher’s room window the yellow team is holding up 300 yellow panels, the bills of their white hats peeking barely over the top, and the leaders stand in front, surveying the damage. When I first came to K-town’s high school the navy shorts were for first year students, and now these same students who used to meet me for cleaning time to chat about lightning and trips to Okinawa, are in front for Sports Day, running in the races, dancing the 20-person crane dance. It feels at once strange to see my first year students grown up, and completely natural.
It reminds me how long I’ve been here. Sports Day started off my year in 2006. I arrived in the sweltering heat of August and stood in the nurse’s tent so I wouldn’t be felled by sunstroke. Now, in the cool of June, we’re watching for rain clouds and getting ready to welcome the first year students with the school song. It’s made me realize I’m not ready for a third debate season, a third obsession with New Years. This is my third Sports Day, due to a fluke in the scheduling, and it’s a nice way to bookend my time here.
The first time everything was a whirlwind of yellow, blue, red and white. Samurai were busting out of panels 30 feet high. Students danced to a tribal beat, silk robes flapping in the morning breeze. I was mesmerized. The second time I knew what to expect and I watched for it. I recognized students faces amidst the waving white gloved hands and the relay races around the arena. But this third time pretty much sums up how I feel about my job as things wind down–what happens the third time? Do I watch lazily from my desk while they write kanji in blocky red panels set against a white background? Do I race out onto the field, done a black military uniform, and learn the dance? I suspect if I stayed, come Culture Festival and debate season, I’d feel as I do now: caught. I’m not a new foreigner watching a spectacle. This is old hat to me, and yet I’m not part of the tradition that keeps it going, or part of the posse of teachers that wanders through the students ranks to make sure everyone is healthy and full of salt. I’m not one of the student teachers, wearing track pants and colored t-shirts, sitting with their backs against the fence, excited to be on the spectator side of Sports Day, but neither am I one of the P.E. teachers who huddled yesterday in the gym over a map of the arena, plotting placements and configurations.
The rest of The Sensei have already been through the Sports Day gauntlet. They’ve flipped panels and cheered and run 30-girl three-legged races. They either wept at the end when their sweaty blue-banded leaders stepped forward to receive the trophy or they wept because they’d lost. The Sensei don’t understand my fascination with Sports Day. Simply saying we don’t have it in America doesn’t seem like enough. It’s more than that. It’s my fascination with Japanese orderliness, with precision. With the way, with the blast of a whistle, 1,000 students will march for an hour while people yell at them they’re not doing it right. And the way their leaders are respected. They’re not burly football players who get people to submit due to their flexing biceps. They’re smaller than the rest of the student body, leaner, but the students still get quiet and take notes when they’re talking. They’re senpai, older students they respect.
This year is particularly interesting for me because I’ve gone through a lot of firsts with the Superhero Class: first Sports Day, first real debate team, first English camp, and now I get to watch them be leaders for the first time. It’s the third Sports Day for both of us–we’re both on the way out–and perhaps that’s what they recognize, and that’s why when we see each other in the hallways they nod at me and smile, like young adults.
