Very Japanese

Two new teachers huddle around the hot water machines. They eye me suspiciously and I hear them whispering, “foreigner” under their breath. One of the hot water pots–notoriously cantankerous–refuses to give me any water and so the woman comes over to push buttons. The sleeve of her wool navy suit brushes against my arm. The younger man gestures to the other machine he has just finished using. “Please,” he says, and pushes the button for me. I shove my cup under the faucet, only just managing to catch the stream of water.

“We are math teachers,” the older woman says, pointing back and forth between the two of them. The younger man adjusts his black plastic glasses.

“Welcome,” I say and take a sip of my scalding hot water.

I’m surprised at how the new teachers have affected me. They notice me, say hello in English in the hallways, but to them I’m a standard fixture on the KHS wall. A ship’s barnacle if you will. I’ve been here longer, and even though I’m much younger, and a pale, round-eyed face, my desk is in the same place it’s always been, and is already stacked with books and cluttered with papers, unlike the clean, empty desk of the new physics teacher sitting kitty-corner from me.

We even have a new vice principal–The Big Kahuna disappeared March 31st–and she stopped working yesterday to have a chat with Praju and I. When did we get here? When will we leave? Where are we from? Praju finds herself constantly explaining English is spoken in India, whereas I’m pleasantly surprised to find our one new English teacher just completed a trip to Seattle and Whitefish, Montana. T-Rex Sensei introduces us to The Young Sensei, and then clomps off while Praju and I try to make small talk about his university days in Nagasaki and his brief post-graduation tour of the Pacific Northwest.

“He and Red Hammer Sensei are a couple,” Gregory Peck Sensei tells me. He pauses so we share a moment of awkward laughter. “But there is no special meaning to this.”

“You mean Red Hammer Sensei’s his mentor?” I ask.

“Yes,” Gregory Peck Sensei says, “so they must sit together.”

Sure enough, I see Red Hammer Sensei passing The Young Sensei notes and fetching him a bookcase for his school-issue English/Japanese dictionaries. They both have on suits and ties–it’s still decently cold even though the cherry blossoms are out–and it makes me smile to see them wandering into the kitchen together, Red Hammer Sensei showing his apprentice how to make green tea.

In other news, The Happy Cook (a Sensei) now sits across from me and has stuck hot pink cherry blossom flowers in a ceramic pot on the corner where O Sensei had an exceptionally tall and tilting pile of paper just waiting to slice open someone’s fingers as they brushed by. The Happy Cook has furry petaled ferns and white gardenias and sips tea delicately from a ceramic mug. She’s a very sweet lady, although she just CAN’T STOP TALKING. She asks me what Japanese food I like, what American food I like, what I cook, what I hate, if I’ll take her to Costco. How did Praju make the curry? Where did we get the cookies? We don’t have O Sensei’s resource library as a barrier between us, so yesterday afternoon I just put my head down on my desk for 20 minutes to rest. When The Sensei returned en masse from their staff meeting and banged books around and answered the jolting phone, I groggily opened my eyes to find The Happy Cook staring straight at me. “Free time?” she asked in Japanese. “What do you usually do? Nap? Read?” And so I spent the last minutes of my day explaining how we say free time in English and that yes, the pink flowers did have a good aroma, but no, I didn’t not want to eat them.

This afternoon, after the introduction to The Young Sensei, T-Rex Sensei and I struck up a chat while he made copies. “I hear The Young Sensei has been to Montana,” he said. “I would love to go.” He paused.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s beautiful.”

“I would really love to go,” T-Rex said. “To the place you’re from.”

I looked over at The Happy Cook who was gazing lovingly at her gardenias. “Oh yeah?” I asked.

He snatched his warm copies hot off the press and leaned in close, his body making an awkward bow. “Such a beautiful place,” he mused. I just smiled back and swallowed the dregs of my morning tea, black tea stems and all. “Well,” I said finally, “he’s very lucky.”

The students mill in the hallways in their club uniforms. From the kitchen window I watch the soccer team dragging old tires across the arena for exercise. A small group of them scrimmages on one half of the gold dirt. Behind them, the famed cherry blossoms have finally burst onto the trees ringing the arena. They are lighter than I remember, a delicate pink, and I can’t stop staring at them.

“We went to Kumamoto Castle,” I tell Gonzo Sensei, “and I was so excited by the cherry blossoms. Johnathan’s brother, Derek, didn’t seem very impressed. But I took hundreds of pictures. I ate cherry blossom ice cream.”

“Ah yes,” Gonzo Sensei says sagely, “you are becoming like a Japanese.”

Read Full Post »

Tests and transfers

The next few weeks are nothing more than an elaborate chess game, and The Sensei are all worried which science teacher will be swapped for a calculus rook, which English queen will be traded for a Chinese-speaking pawn. The Big Kahuna and K-town’s principal have closed door meetings in the afternoon with the teachers’ pictures spread before them like playing cards. They’re deciding how many teachers they will transfer, and from which subjects. What will the panoply look like without Gregory Peck Sensei’s famous face, Gonzo Sensei’s debate finesse? Where should we send these teachers? A commercial school? An art school? North to the city hub of Japanese gangsters?

In theory they’re looking at the yearly evaluations, students’ comments from class, colleague opinions as they make these decisions. In practicality no one knows how these decisions are made–or why. O Sensei has been at K-town’s school for 20 years, an obscenely long time in one place by Japanese standards. Ms. Delicious and Mount Fuji Sensei were both new last April. They turned up at school freshly scrubbed with cardboard boxes of textbooks and tapes. On average, teachers stay at a school for three years before they’re transfered, so they can follow the students from one year to the next, although there are clearly exceptions. T-Rex Sensei has been teaching the third year students for the last seven years. Ms. Delicious says no one is safe, even her. Gonzo Sensei, her back problems finally under control, wants to move with the Superhero class when they become third year students.

But no one will know anything until March 21st, next Friday.

After next Friday they have ten days to pack their desks, say their good-byes and slip in a quick vacation before they report to their new schools for the start of the year. Curriculum meetings have already begun, and preliminary plans are being drawn. The reality that we could lose O Sensei, our undisputed leader and mastermind, makes these attempts half-hearted at best. We could do this, we could do that, we could have these lessons or not. Next Friday O Sensei will sit at her desk, waiting to see if she’s called for a private meeting in the principal’s office–it can only mean one thing.

The Big Kahuna not only decides who stays at school, but he decides what they will do here. The Sensei are told which grade they will teach, if they will be homeroom teachers, and what extra duties they might have. O Sensei, the tea ceremony supervisor for over a dozen years, may have to turn over the keys and the Sado Sensei’s phone number. Gonzo Sensei, the swim leader, will get rid of the pool keys. Ms. Delicious, the English club leader, will no longer approve masks and markers as expenses for our Halloween party.

It’s nail-biting time, and makes everyone feel a unique kinship with the third year students still waiting on results from University entrance exams. The third year students trickle into the staff room during the sunny afternoons. They whisper something in their homeroom teacher’s ear, and then an announcement is made and the whole room erupts in applause. In the next few days their name and the name of their university is typed onto a plastic strip and hung in the hallway.

The peach blossoms are out, the plum blossoms are about to fall, and in two weeks, when it’s cherry blossom time, everything will have been decided. It’s just that now we keep seeing shots of pink as the buds begin to open and our hearts beat a little faster, thinking the results are in. We’re still a week away, and in the meantime The Sensei are correcting entrance examinations, deciding which junior high school students will be first year students next year. They spend all morning and afternoon wielding red pens, their seconds sitting behind them waiting to give them a sip of water, a fresh red marker, a pat on the back. Everyone wants to admit the best and brightest students. They may or may not be teaching here next year, but if they are they don’t want to deal with the guilt of admitting a less than stellar student–of exam sabotage.

I wasn’t really aware what was happening last year, with the transfers. I was told the results a week after the fact and honestly, they didn’t affect me that much. I like the new teachers we’ve gotten this year as a result. But this year I’ve built bonds with some of the teachers. Gonzo Sensei and I crafted arguments and spent late nights eating smoked almonds and going over rebuttal speeches with the debate teams. One of the front office workers has just brought paperwork for me to stamp. I will be paid $200 for all my debate overtime this fall. And if Gonzo Sensei has to come into the teacher’s room next Friday and whisper in my ear that she’s headed off into the rice fields, I will probably not react with wild applause. I can tell you this: The Sense work way more overtime than I do, and don’t get paid for it. You’d think they’d want to keep these teachers around as long as possible.

Read Full Post »

Croak in the throat

T-Rex Sensei has just presented Praju and I with soy milk and fruit juice boxes, perhaps as a sign of penitence for drunkenly telling me Saturday night I was his favorite ALT ever, no, really, the best, while Praju stood beside me pretending not to see his hulking tweed-clad frame. Gonzo Sensei lets me in on a secret: he’s having a rough time of it. He got worked over in the english teacher’s meeting yesterday afternoon, although she doesn’t give me many details. “He was almost in tears,” she says, and this morning, perhaps as a cover for this excess of emotion, T-Rex tells me he has a “croak in his throat”. You mean your voice is hoarse, I say. “Horse?” he asks. I spell it on my hand.

What can I tell you about graduation? The principal stood on the stage between a purple kimonoed teacher and a small bonsai tree. He wore white gloves. Each students’ name was called by their teacher, they yelled, “yes!” and leapt to their feet and then, as a class, sat down. This year I understood the commands, so I didn’t have any false starts, my legs leaping ahead of me to stand up when the graduates ONLY were asked to stand. The 3-1 class breezed right by the teachers at a good clip before we could get organized and start the official hand shaking. I made a quick video of them sobbing into their washcloths, their slippers shuffling along the green tarped floor.

After lunch I went up to the 3-1 room with the English club to give out candies and notes to the third years students, and Araki Sensei was in her yellow kimono glory passing out diplomas one-by-one. The students gave her a scrapbook, and then she motioned for me to step into the room and give my “message”. So I walked up to the podium, grabbed both sides of it, and promptly lost control of my tear ducts. All the students were crying and when I looked at their faces and tried to say, “I’m so proud of you,” all that came out was, “I didn’t mean to cry!” They laughed, I laughed, and then I was able to regain control and tell them I had good memories of them and that I would miss them, and would they please email me? I came down off the stage, things officially ended, and I spent 20 minutes taking individual pictures with most of the 40 students. They were crying and so in most of the pictures their eyes are squeezed shut, their hands in the peace sign. And me? My nose grew bigger with each flash until in the end it was just a picture of my nose with two fingers sticking out the side like anteneas.

Praju and I, emotionally spent, came back to the staff room and waited out the afternoon in a catatonic state, staring at our computers, scheming about sneaking out early. It’s a good thing we didn’t because the English club third years brought us bouquets of yellow flowers as a thank you for all our hard work, and we took more awkward and backlit pictures in the hall of windows.

Nothing much exciting happened at The Grand Feast, except T-Rex Sensei’s drunken assertion that my English ability was amazing, my pronunciation the best he’d ever heard. There were no purple streamered wrists like last year, PTA mothers doing disco numbers on stage (much to my disappointment). The Big Kahuna was not made to stand red-sake faced on stage and claim he was way into race cars. Each homeroom teacher and sub-homeroom teacher gave a speech, and I could understand a bit of them, although most of the jokes went right over my head. News was slipped: one of the ex-teachers is pregnant and her husband (K-town’s math teacher) sat, beaming, in the back. Gonzo Sensei said she’d reconsidered and now wants to follow the Superhero class into their third year. They have a place in her heart.

And today, March 5th, Araki Sensei is passing out poppyseeded cake, a present from Rika’s mother, so proud is she that Rika passed the entrance examination. She will now have her name and school typed onto a plastic strip and stuck up in the hallway outside the teacher’s room. And now, finally, she can stop coming to school. Graduation may be over, but the curtain hasn’t yet fallen for the students who haven’t passed entrance examinations. It seems ceremony gets them into school, but only by the successful wielding of a lead-tipped pencil can they officially get out.

Read Full Post »

Yakuza funeral

I’m not sure how to casually introduce the idea that there’s a gangster funeral across the street from the school today, so I’ll just allow you a minute to re-read that sentence and contemplate how from your perspective tucked safely in Montana or at home hiding under a futon, suddenly K-town has gone from being that lacksadasical place where I pick persimmons and skip down the street into a metal bars and gun holsters kind of place where we’ve literally locked and barricaded ourselves behind a thick iron wall. I’ve written a lot about the way K-town’s high school runs like a well-oiled machine, how we bow in the morning to The Big Kahuna, how there are announcements about the tennis team or cleaning time, and we all applaud for each other, and then we all go on about our days, scurrying to and from class, with only enough time between periods to wave to each other over sips of green tea. But this morning after all the homeroom Sensei had left to brief their students on their homework for the day and to remind them to not throw away their orange peels in the class garbage cans, The Big Kahuna got onto the all-school microphone and asked all the teachers to report back to the teacher’s room for an emergency announcement.

So they came trooping back, books under their arms, and we all sat nervously at our desks, some of us afraid the girl who faints had taken a tumble down the stairs, some of us afraid The Big Kahuna was going to introduce morning calisthenics. The Big Kahuna stood up, cleared his throat, and launched into a speech during which I understood the words “hospital” and the times “one to four”. I must admit I was expecting O Sensei to turn to Praju and I and say there’d been an outbreak of measles or mumps or chicken pox, and we were all required to get to the hospital for an emergency vaccination, because the collected intake of breath I heard from the Sensei and then the exhale of surprise and the quick suspicious glances made me think our sweaty staff room with the morning sun streaming into our eyes was really just an incubator for some really dreadful disease that would have us all flat on our backs by noon.

The reality is much less “virus wipes out Kyushu”. Two yakuza, gangsters, in Japan were killed in a town near ours yesterday. One was shot and the other stabbed, and no one is quite sure what the tussle was about. Or, at least, the Japanese mob hasn’t clearly communicated it to K-town’s high school. What was communicated in the emergency meeting was that the funeral for these two well-ranked gangsters is taking place literally across the street because apparently this is the biggest community/funeral center in many kilometers. At least this is what I told the debate students when they asked me, just so that Ryosuke, who muttered under this breath, “she won’t know,” in Japanese, wouldn’t be right.

So the school went on lockdown this afternoon, and no one is allowed in or out. Especially not any men in suits with mirrored sunglasses and tattoos, the official uniform for all yakuza. If we see anyone missing a pinky finger we’re supposed to alert the rest of the Sensei immediately, and I imagine we’d all run out to the gate with the scalding water from our teapots or the scissors in the flower arranging room, the school’s only real weapons. All of the yakuza in our area of Kyushu are expected to turn up for this event, so we’re supposed to stay away from the second story windows, should a fight break out and a spare bullet shoots through the English room window.

“I know we’re supposed to be serious,” Gonzo Sensei said, “but deep in my heart it’s kind of exciting. I think the students could tell.” And Praju and I, feeling we’re missing the chance to view a great, unusual festival, want to sneak up to the library with my telephoto lense to snap some pictures of the great evil underbelly of Japan congregating to toss flowers and rub more oil into their hair. We’ve driven past the yakuza street before, and all of us crane our necks out the window to get a look at the great black SUV, the car of choice. To see all of the black suburban’s noses pointed, like a school of fish, at the community center I ride past once a week would, I’m sure, send a shiver of excitement up my long john-clad legs.

Yet it all feels more like a parade, an elaborate show, than an event where I could feasibly lose life and limb. Like if I see those men, hulking and scary, skalking outside the school’s gates, peering in at us as we peer out at them, careful to shield our vital organs with pencil cases and recently returned exams, it will feel more like we’re watching a carefully recreated historical play where the audience is made to believe they have a vital dramatic role, but at the end end of the day all the actors really just go down to a local ramen shop and pose for pictures with us, the customers, who pretend to look afraid, but are really going to frame the photo and put it on their wall. And when someone comments we’ll shrug and say, “oh yeah, that was Takehiro, the guy who knifed the other gangster. Isn’t it a great picture? I love how the late afternoon light really brings out the skull tattoo on his cheek.”

Read Full Post »

Level up!

One of our debaters really gets debate. He has “level upped” as Gonzo Sensei says, which means he understands the straight arrow logic of English and isn’t still speaking in the spiral of Japanese thought. Today is our first match between the two teams who are going to the debate tournament in three short weeks, and they’re scrambling this rainy afternoon to get their arguments in a row.

“Ryosuke knows their negative argument,” Gonzo Sensei says, “so he ran off to find research to attack them.” The girls on the other team come to us, begging us to stop him. “It’s so typically Ryosuke,” Gonzo Sensei says. “He wants to be as prepared as he can be.” This is the boy who rebuts everything we talk about in our meetings, who can attack any idea. He has flowcharts for cross-examination and a mountain of articles on his desk. We hi-lite the same important quotes.

“I’m not going to stop him,” Gonzo Sensei says, “they just have to prepare their response. This is what I told them.” So these two teams who were previously working together, who shared crepes the other night as a special treat, are now eyeing each other warily, using their elbows and knees to hide their evidence sheets, running off behind each others’ backs to research evidence on the computer. They secretly bring their notebooks into the teacher’s room for us to check their English.

For once I’m going to do all I can to encourage this competition. Because in the end they will have to face teams from 10 other schools, and if they they find their worst, most aggressive enemies are wearing the same uniform–well, the actual competition will seem like a coach’s dream.

Read Full Post »

How I got my Harry Potter book back

The fence casts a striped shadow on the corner of the school’s driveway, and I’m trying to stand in it, feigning nochalance, eyeing the students as they whiz by on their newly-unlocked bicycles. The boys have their pants rolled up to the knees–it’s still 80 unpleasant degrees in October–and the girls have shed their navy blazers. They hang, arms splayed, over the sides of their baskets like very large paper dolls. It’s a mass exodus. During a standard week the students trickle out as school finishes, and later after clubs when the sky stops being the pleasant orange of an October sunset and instead becomes dark enough that a student clothed in, say, a full-navy uniform might not be easily spotted by an oncoming persimmon truck.

Today is the last day of their mid-term exams, and the tables in the hall are empty by lunchtime. Only Mai, the noodle-maker’s daughter, and a few others remain, their neat rows of colored hi-liters already slid back into their Sesame Street pencil cases. All morning the teachers bring me red-marked answer keys and ask me to check the placement of adverbs, can the students torque the sentence like this? Can the verb be shifted to the beginning? Can we “grow up” children?

In the afternoon they’re off in meetings so the rotating fan only hits Mount Fuji Sensei and I on the side of the head and ruffles the papers stacked in foot-deep piles on the absent Sensei’s desks. The Sensei have required seminars during their exam-free afternoons, when the students go home after lunch. Last year they had CPR, where they had to run across the room at a sprint and shock a dummy; once we had a fire-drill, and it was so cold all the girls squatted on the ground, trying to tuck their legs under their skirts like chickens. Yesterday, as I was leaving the teacher’s room to help a student with speech practice, Ms. Delicious put a hand on my arm. “You need a towel,” she said, holding up her white cotton square. The other teachers brushed past us, thick blue towels slung over their shoulders or dainty paisley-printed towels tucked into the ladies skirts. “For aromatherapy,” Ms. Delicious said. And all during the time I was helping the student with her speech I kept peeking in the windows of the room next door and I saw the Sensei giving themselves hand massages, rubbing their oily hands on each others’ towels. “It was Nurse Funny Skirt’s idea,” Gonzo Sensei says, later, “she’s kind of obsessed with it.” There are worse ways to spend a required afternoon, I imagine, then rubbing scented oil into your fingers that feel ready to fall off from stamping students papers all morning. Of course, this was followed up by a lecture on how to prevent computer hackers, and an admonishment that should we have any desire to join the computer hacker business, K-Town’s High School is not the place to cut our teeth. That pretty well sucked the relaxing out of the room.

Outside, at lunchtime, I’m waiting for Hana. I’m making notes when she shows up, and so my face is streaked with sweat, my fingers inky. We’ve been waxing the floors, so my toes feel chalky, the soles of my shoes slick. She pulls up on her bike and reaches into her purse for her package. “This feels like a drug drop,” she says, handing me Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I tuck the book under my arm and turn to head inside. “How did it go?” I ask. Hana leans back on her bike and holds a hand up to shade her eyes. “They were really into the sorting hat,” she says.

I take the book back inside and as I’m eating lunch I query O Sensei. How much reading is too much? Am I expecting too much of them? She thinks for a minute and then says, “20 pages a week sounds reasonable.” Which is exactly what I have assigned. I’m used to thinking their failing is my fault as a teacher. Every so often it’s just nice to know that it’s not like I’ve assigned them the Bible as beach reading.

Read Full Post »

Followership

We finished the death penalty debate in debate class and in light of the fact that we only have about five weeks left of school we opted for an easier topic during the second go-round. For the last two weeks the students have been brainstorming about the effects of Japanese high schools dropping all non-academic classes and festivals.

I guess you wouldn’t call anyone who goes to school 10 hours a day, 240 days out of the year lazy, but their affirmative arguments are all about how this “laziness” has crept into schools in the form of calligraphy, music and P.E. classes, and if it could be eradicated it’d be a more pleasant world for all. Better test scores, better reputations for the schools, less homework. Things would be peachy keen.

It’s not all rose-colored glasses, though. Predictably they say they would have no fun without festivals, that they couldn’t bond with their friends, that thousands of teachers would lose their jobs. They stress that they learn things like “leadership” and “sophistication” from grunting and sweating in the school’s arena during August’s sports festival.

Today Gonzo Sensei beckons me over to help a group. “Tell me if this is an English word,” she says, “followership.”

I shake my head. Then, because the English side of my brain has been on haitus lately, I call across the room to Larin. He shakes his head. “There is no single word to explain it,” I say, “it’s not something we talk a lot about.”

Gonzo Sensei goes on to explain that “followership” (a word they say in “English”) is a very important concept in Japan. “More cultural differences,” she says. It’s no secret that followership has been an important factor in Japanese history, and up until World War 2 no one thought much about leadership at all. The important thing–the reason they wear uniforms, march, are kept at school until they are exhausted–is to blend in. Gonzo Sensei talks about how leadership came into vogue a while ago and they encouraged their students to go down that path, but only so far.

Now, she says, they’re trying to reign them in. When they see students with wild, dyed hair, earrings, girls with their skirts rolled up above their knees, they remind them that leadership, sticking out, is not the way we do things around here. There are specific times and places to be leaders. There are student leaders at sports day, student council members, but those students are stepping into a role that requires a costume change, a specific cultivated voice, soothing words. They’re not out to rile up the student body, but instead to subdue it, place a calming blanket of words over the students who are so lulled they sometimes nod off to sleep in assemblies. It gives the rest of us a chance, while we’re kneeling on the hard wood floor, to practice our followership skills.

I got to thinking about the word followership, and how no one wants to be a follower in America. I plug it into my thesaurus and it pulls up: minion, lackey, attendant, servant, hanger-on, sidekick. That doesn’t sound like something I want to be, that anyone strives to be. They sound like groveling, sniveling people. This is the Superhero class, all grown up and professional, but even they know it’s better to be the Supervillain than the sidekick. You get more screen time for one. They understand this in an abstract way.

When the spotlight does get thrust on them they shrink and cower. In the last few weeks we’ve had to pick a new leader for English club, and none of the second year girls want the job. I made them do a heads-down vote, they barely elected a leader, and the next day Ms. Delicious came up to say the voting had to be ruled invalid, that the girl went to her boyfriend in tears, and he appealed to Ms. Delicious. The pressure of all 10 sets of eyes on her. Why, it’s more than one should have to bear.

Yet when I think about followership in Japan it actual seems like something beautiful. In tea ceremony, all of us girls watching while one girl wipes the cup, turns the bowl just so, pours the water, whips the tea. We mimic it in our heads, we learn to do as she does. In flower arranging Black River Sensei makes up my flowers for me first, sticking them in delicately, purposefully, and then in great handfuls she rips them out of the vase and beckons for me to try. All twenty of us girls start, a rose in one hand, clippers on the other, trying to remember exactly what she’s done. Last night at Shodo class I practiced the same kanji dozens of times, twisting my wrist just so, getting a little more or less ink, all the while my gaze fixed on the perfect black strokes Naoko drew as a guide.

It’s unlikely that I’ll take this newfound respect for following back with me to America. I’m not the sort to throw my clippers like darts or overturn my barrels of ink willy-nilly, at the slightest provocation, just to wreak havoc, but neither do I like when Black River Sensei tweaks and twists my flowers after I finish my creation, making them fall more “in line”.

Ms. Delicious told me a terrible story about T-Rex Sensei berating another teacher for giving weekend homework, following her into the printing room where she broke down and cried, and then a few days later giving her a juice box, a childish gift for childish (and unapologetic) actions. Pushed to the breaking point they have no conflict resolution skills to cushion the encounter, just apologies, excuse mes, it must have been something I did, in the face of tirades. Meanwhile I’m standing on the sidelines, unsure of what’s happening without English subtitles, hearing T-Rex Sensei screaming across the staff room, and I’m glad I wasn’t taught to kneel and submit, to be just a sidekick. If anything I’d rather be the Supervillain: powerful, wordy, gusty enough to stand up to a man nearly two feet taller than me. Now that I’ve developed my follwership skills and learned how to wield my clippers with finesse I would make a formidable opponent. I know the ways of scalding hot tea, I know how to fling ink, I know how to pluck rose thorns. And if backed into a corner I plan to use all the sedate lessons Japan has taught me to build a whole group of new followers who support my cause.

Read Full Post »

I’ll cut your head off with this spoon if you ever say that to me again. Ever.

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m perusing death penalty statistics. Did you know Russia has a moretorium on the death penalty, which means they can fire up their electric chair whenever they choose? But, for the moment (to keep the peace in highly regulated Europe) they’ve sworn, with their hand on a stack of Bibles, that they probably won’t. I can’t really be surprised that Russia, the country with the longest railroad in the world and Siberia, a place you still need an invitation to visit, likes lording its we can do anything to you we’re Russia death penalty moretorium over the people squatting in St. Petersburg’s expensive, expensive streets.

But then there’s Turkey. Little Turkey, who reminds you of the kid brother you tell to get you lemonade so you can “time” him. Turkey runs off lickety-split because what if just this once you were timing? Then what would he do? This time Turkey has ratified protocol 13 which his big brothers Armenia, France, Spain, Italy, Poland and Latvia have not ratified. These countries have all outlawed the death penalty in times of peace or de jure, but in times of wartime or the imminent threat of war they’ve still allowed themselves a policial cushion on which to land. Ah Turkey, you eager little beaver, good luck torturing your prisoners now. The very least you can do is ship them off to Italy where they’ll really have to suffer.

Why all this political talk, huh Peaquah, you’re asking. Where’s the light-hearted Japan stories about how the students draw you chalkboard pictures of Japanese superheros (including breadman!)? The tribulations about moving your desk across the room? The utter sadness in your melodramatic prose of not having cleaning time with the same students ever again? Ever!

We’re in full boar preparation time, and Gonzo Sensei has laid out the plan of attack. A debate on capital punishment. A subject, she says, “they can relate to.” This means that I, the English reader, will be researching English articles for my new and improved superhero-turned-debate class. The students’ job is to understand all this political whoo-haw. I bring the bacon. They gobble it up.

Meanwhile, the editorial committee is meeting next week in a room with a polished oval table and rocking and rolling leather chairs. I feel like we should be playing RISK in there, or cultivating an illegal border crossing regime. This time I’ll settle for unfurling a map of the countries still retaining their death penatly rights and listen to the collective gasp go up. Who is this madwoman we formerly knew as Peaquah and why does she care so much about the death penalty? What kind of power does she really have?

The power of knowledge, baby, the power of knowledge.

Read Full Post »

the dried fruit debacle

I just participated in what, I think, was a teacher evaluation. It was of a Sensei I’ll call Gonzo Sensei (because her name sounds a lot like Gonzo) who I like very much. She is a very fluent speaker of English and has a hint of an Arkansas/English accent, but probably the best pronunciation and vocabulary in the school. The other English teachers called this a ‘model lesson’, but when I asked K Sensei what we were doing she said ‘watching so we can talk about it later’. I’m not sure if that talk with be positive or negative, but as it will be held in Japanese I will probably never know.

What happened was this: all of the English teachers trooped into the room and sat on tiny first-grader chairs in the back of the classroom with their backs to a chalkboard. The class had forty Japanese students. The lesson was titled ‘Styles of Communication’ and they were translating an article (from English to Japanese) that basically tried to explain why Americans have a hard time knowing what Japanese people mean. It explains that silence is highly valued in Japan, and from birth mothers set up a pattern of silent, intuitive communication with their children. On the other hand, Americans can’t stop talking. We point out peole’s faults, critique them in public, express our wishes and needs. The Japanese have a complicated system of pauses and soft grunts that cover the gamit of all these emotions. No one directly says ‘I don’t like your skirt.’ Instead they make a comment like ‘what an interesting choice of dress’ and based on their tone of voice, body language, and the other meanings of the word ‘interesting’ derived from the Chinese character, the listener is supposed to figure out never to wear the skirt again. I, on the other hand, smile dumbly and say, ‘why thank you’. You can see why when east meets west some things really does get lost in the translation.

We were in the middle of the article, when Gonzo Sensei read the sentence: ‘[this] can cause tremendous problems for Americans, who discover to their frustration that ‘yes’ often means ‘no,’ but cannot figure out when.‘ Larin and I were nodding along, elbowing each other like students when Gonzo Sensei asked, ‘Kendra Sensei, have you ever had an experience with this?’ A couple thoughts sprang to mind. I had asked, only a few days before, if my sister, Jazlyn, could come to English Camp in the spring (a 2-day camp for first-year English students) if she decides to visit Japan. The response I got was pretty typical. The two teachers I asked both said ‘yes’ right away, but then by the end of the conversation that enthusiastic response had petered down to ‘most likely’ and now, a few days later, I haven’t heard so much as a peep. Part of me wants to take that as a good sign, but I know these tricky Japanese and I’m afraid that a few days before camp, when my sister is already in Japan, they will pull me aside and say ‘Kendra Sensei, would it be all right if your sister did not come?’ and I can’t say ‘all right? of course it will not be all right! She’s already in Japan for crying out loud.’ The correct response will be, ‘okay, but…’ and then I subtly agree, but lay out my reasons with a lot of ‘if it’s okay’ and ‘excuse the inconvenience’.

Before we even came to Japan I had a small confusion over what apartment Johnathan and I were to share. We both got emails from our schools saying ‘You will be pleased to know that you and your wife/husband can life together in our apartment.’ We were quite pleased to have a choice, and once we made it my supervisor sent me a few emails starting with ‘if it’s not too inconvenient can you please move into the apartment our school has for you?’ Could you please meant: you darn well better. It took 36 hours of phone calls from the program coordinator’s office to my school principal to the vice-principal to my supervisor and back up through the line to me, waiting in Montana, for it to be worked out.

But here is the example I gave in class. A few weeks ago, while the students were practicing for Sports Day (a grand track meet/culture festival combination) I brought out a bag of dried mango to have as a snack while we watched the students run 20-person three-legged races. As is expected I offered pieces to everyone around me, saying, politely, dozo (please, take some). Three teachers took a piece and all of them made mmmmmm…noises as we savored the sweet flavor. The New Zealand exchange student, Nick, was sitting next to me, and between the two of us we finished off my bag. He’s a seventeen year-old-boy made to go from 7am to 1pm without eating, and I could see the lust in his eyes when I brought out the snack. Then T Sensei, the head of the English teachers, came to sit next to me. I offered him my last piece. Although it is basically an insult to refuse food offered to you he shook his head no. Okay, I said, happy to have the last piece to myself. Or, more likely, I would have given it to Nick, who couldn’t have wanted it more if it had had pictures of naked ladies on it.

‘I regret to tell you,’ T Sensei said, ‘That you should not eat while the students are practicing.’

I looked behind me at the row of teachers trying to quickly swallow their mango pieces. One teacher shoved it in his mouth and, I guess, swallowed it whole. The rest of them looked at the ground or at the students sweating, trying to do traditional dances to a taiko drum in ninety-degree weather. None of them looked at me.

‘Why?’ I asked.

He held up a hand in the air, gesturing toward the students. ‘If they cannot eat then we should not. They are to do what we do.’

I slid my little plastic bag into my pocket and sunk down in my chair.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘no one told me.’ I wanted to point an accusatory finger at the row of teachers behind me. They were like the masterminds of a prank who then let their younger brother take the heat.

I thought I was being polite, offering it to the teachers around me, although I realize now they may have been trying to tell me (in their intuitive, subtle, Japanese way) through their body language that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Then I went ahead and played the part of the goofy, smiling, annoyingly friendly American who keeps insisting ‘No, really, you must socially disgrace yourself. Please, let me help you.’

I finished my story in class and the students whipped their heads around to the front. ‘That was an interesting example,’ Gonzo Sensei said. ‘Thank you.’

It was only after class, when T Sensei tracked me down in the hallway on my way to get lunch that I realized singling him out in my example may have been another dried fruit-like debacle.

To my surprise he said, ‘Thank you for giving the example.’

‘Was it okay?’ I asked.

He looked at the floor for awhile and smiled at my feet. I curled my toes. ‘Yes,’ he said, finally.

‘I meant it as a compliment,’ I rushed on, in the non-silent way I learned to express my feelings, ‘I appreciate it when you tell me these things,’ I finished lamely. T Sensei smiled at me.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘If it’s not too inconvenient…do you have a moment?’

‘Of course,’ I said. I prepared myself for effusive compliements or a subtle lesson on Japanese etiquette.

Instead, just like an American, T Sensei said, ‘You embarassed me,’ turned his back and walked back to the teacher’s room.

‘Welcome to my world, T Sensei,’ I said to myself.

Read Full Post »