The plans for The Dance of the Cards are blocky and angular, sketched onto scraps of cardboard. They look like old Nintendo games. Eight rows up, one across: yellow, column four, row six: blue. In this way, two hundred students sitting on three-story bleachers flip colored cards to spell Go! Win! Blue! Red! and any manner of kanji I can’t read. They’re on the grounds now, all three teams practicing at once, six hundred voices shouting and the leaders, holding red, blue, yellow megaphones pace in front of their teams, yelling at spot 63 who flipped red instead of white or singing don-dada-don-dada-don, the sound of the drum. The dancers are off to the sides, swinging their arms like swords, standing in a single-file line and waving their arms like a giant sea creature.
The bleachers are still sparse, the students milling around drinking sports drinks while half of them practice. They were given instructions to bring salt to school today, and I imagined them all shuffling through the doors with burlap sacks slung over their shoulders, their backs hunched like miners. Instead, we’ve been given cloud cover, an umbrella that’s been sitting over the school all day. We keep looking at each other, mouthing: aren’t we lucky because the sun hasn’t burst through and it hasn’t started raining. We’re waiting for one disaster or the other.
The leaders are frantic, running laps around their teams as they jiggle their hips to the Spice Girls for their “folk dance”. During the 30-person three legged race they run backwards in front of their teams, yelling: one, two, one, two! This afternoon, when the teachers get a three-legged group together the Sports Day leaders come to coach us. Baby steps, sensei, they say, baby steps.
We’re a day or so away from the giant pictures going up on top of the bleachers. They’re big as billboards and require professional installation, the construction workers hanging from the limbs of nearby trees or dangling off vaulted machinery to get them stapled secure enough so they don’t crash down on the yellow teams’ heads, like a piece of the falling sky. Right now the chaos is manageable. There are drums. There are flailing arms. There are white cards that should be blue. Students have paint stained up and down their arms, splattered across their shoes, from the giant pictures. They’re not quite ready for everything to be finalized, for the paint to dry, so to speak.
But on Saturday, when we rake the grounds and pluck weeds from around the tree trunks and methodically line up rows of chairs under tents for the spectators, it will no longer be okay to get 20 balls into the basket instead of 21. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the ones who just can’t get their act together–the exchange students, the first year students–will be so caught up in the awesome mechanical rhythms of a team that moves with more liquid finesse than a school of fish, that it will be as though I’m watching an entirely different Sports Day, with entirely different students. For when have I ever seen my students run this fast? Or the teachers with burns on their legs from the three-legged race? Or two-hundred cards flip with such precision that it’s like watching a giant shuffle?
In Japan, you’re either one of the mural artists or you’re just that kid in the corner with paint in his eyebrows. All jobs are equal, all roles fair, and when you believe that, deep down, it’s no wonder you’re willing to sit under a 90-degree sun for six hours a day while people whistle at you to wiggle your card, snap your fingers, yell. Now! Now! Again now! The teachers are all under tents, more voyeurs than enforcers. Our job is to make sure the sick ones get to the nurse, to send everyone inside when we hear thunder, to orchestrate the set-up. But we have no punishing power, no mallets to wield to keep the students in the game. Should they want to come out, we let them. We’re a very flimsy barrier between school and home. Yet they can’t walk away. Turning their backs to their class mates in the bleachers, letting down the older students they so want to impress, telling their group leader they can’t hold up their end of the bargain, that their colored card is just too much of a burden to bear. They’re in this to the end, black skin or not. Skin cancer, raisin eyes, dehydration–they’ve signed on for the full tour. This is why they practice until they have paper cuts the size of my thumb, heat rashes on their thighs from the dance moves. Because what worse punishment is there, what easier way can you imagine to let your team down than trying to spell “Go” when all your teammates are spelling “Blue”?
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