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.“
