Switch your minds

It should come as no surprise to you that the blue team won Sports Day. As it turns out, they have all the track stars. The students are divided evenly and randomly, but there is no weight (or counter-weight) given for track prowess, and so “randomly”, all the good track runners ended up on the blue team. Which would explain why, at the end of every race, the blue-banded kids were breaking through the finishing tape. And also why the blue team seemed so enthusiastic in practice. That *was* their version of laziness. Oh, what must it be like to have hamstrings of steel?

The third year students were happy to see me again. The pressure of translation and vocabulary was lifted off their shoulders and carried away in the rain clouds on Thursday afternoon, and they smiled and put a yellow robe on me and posed for funny pictures. They squealed my name when I wandered over to where they were changing under a small grove of pines. When the boys came out bare-chested for camel wars, the girls on their team danced and cheered for them, and I crouched on the ground and listened to them chanting “yellow! yellow!” on one side, and the boys grunting and tussling in the dirt on the other.

It turned out to be an emotional day for me, even though I hadn’t felt it sneaking up on me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to hunch down in the dirt next to the huge tug-of-war rope and take pictures on the continuous mode. I wandered back behind the bleachers and took photos of the Red team’s legs spread across the metal seats like rays of the sun. I got pictures of the blue team before their folk dance, all trussed up with mickey mouse ears. Dragon robes flapped. Boys pounded the taiko drum. All 243 students in each block’s bleachers cheered and sang the school song.

And I lurked about the event like a strange-looking paparazzi. I sat down in the first row of the red team, used one of their panels to hide my yellow t-shirt, and listened to their good-bye speeches. The leaders thanked the students for their hard work, applauded for Kouhei, who won the cheering dance for them, and then passed on the reigns. They told the second year students to crane their necks around to see the yellow team’s back panel (a mishmash of tree branches and kabuki heads with a killer paint job). “Study it,” they instructed. “It won this year. Try to figure out why so you can do it for the red team next year.” Everyone cried. The girls passed the faulty megaphone from one to the other with slippery hands. The boys tried to hide their eyes with their red headbands. In the background, The Senseis ripped down tents and yanked out the wires of the sound system.

At the end of the day everyone gathered back in the arena where they squatted by class. Navy slippers to one side, red on the other, turquoise in the middle. The teachers paced back and forth in the fading light, the flagpole’s shadows striping their backs, and told them it was time to switch their minds. “Do not go to parties tonight,” they said, “it’s time to get back to studying.”

“But we’re going to a teacher’s party,” I whispered to O Sensei, “isn’t this a little hypocritical?”

“They must know,” she said, “that the fun is over. The most important thing is that they learn to switch their minds.”

I can’t say for sure if this worked or not. I didn’t see the kids again until this morning. In my fourth period class they were clammy and drooping like old tulips. But the mood has definitely shifted. No longer do I come to school in track pants a red t-shirt with Coca-Cola written on it in Japanese. No longer have the students been illegally practicing in the park after dark. We have two weeks until final exams, and the third-year students have business to be done. The Sensei are running exam papers off the mimeograph machines that whirl like a steam press. The men are wearing collared shirts and muted ties. I haven’t seen a dragon robe in what feels like ages.

Read Full Post »

An inappropriate use of English

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.“

Read Full Post »

Blue Block

The blue team–or block as they’re called–is playing to win. This morning in the costume-less dress rehearsal the students are doing a mock run of all the races. Every 10 minutes a new starting gun goes off, a new Japanese pop song comes on the speakers, and a group of relay-runners jogs around the track. Except for the members of the blue team. They’ve clearly been told, in no uncertain terms, that this is not a slacker’s practice. They’re running as fast as they can. During the race where two boys carry a girl in a small bamboo swing, the blue team leaps ahead and stays that way through all eight legs of the race. The student announcers all but say, “well, the blue team is in the lead again.” When someone really needs to say, woa, blue team, chill out.

I think their interest was piqued this morning when they had to hand over the trophy and plaques from last year’s Sports Day. They’ve had those in their “possession” (and by possession I mean in the school’s trophy case) for the last year. They have a reputation to protect.

The blue and yellow girls come out for a 300-person tug of war. I can hear the yellow team laughing. The blue girls grunt and yank. They’ve got game. They’ve placed a dozen stalwart third-year girls at the end of the line, and they heave and ho on that rope. The blue team wins.

The boys line up for the centipede race. They stand single-file in one direction, lean forward and grasp the hand of the person in front of them. Through that person’s legs. Then they march backwards, with the last person in line laying down. The red team clearly has coordination issues, and the first year boys keep sitting on each other’s faces or stepping on each other’s shoulders. Several times the chain breaks and they must pause, regroup, and start again. It seems a given that the yellow team will win this practice race. They’re centipeding smoothly backwards, but when they get to the end where the last person leaps up and starts the chain in reverse, they fall apart. The blue team, on the far side of the arena, appears magically out of the mist of arms and legs and light rain. They are the slow and steady turtle. They’re speeding to the finish line. They win.

A dozen blue team leaders, with megaphones and whistles, stand in front of the blue block. They’re leading the students in a clapping cheer. On the other two stands the yellow and red teams lounge about, talking. During a particularly exciting race–when a yellow or red member outruns a blue–they hoot and cheer.

Now, the students are doing a folk dance to old 80’s music. They stand in circles, clapping, then link arms and swing each other around. This is an event that gets big points, and so the blue team is standing off to the side, watching their competitors, trying to figure out their flaws.

Read Full Post »

We are fired up

The blue team is throwing up its arms outside the window, casting shadows in the arena. I can’t see the red team because Nurse Funny Skirt’s tent is in my way, but I can hear them yelling, “crab! crab! crab! crab!”–their color mascot. The yellow team–my team–seems totally disorganized. I see flashes of yellow and white, but they’re practicing neither their cheering or the dance. Perhaps they’re all just really fast relay runners and we’ll make up the points at the races. Or, yellow team, as Kana said this morning in class, “Let’s get fired up!”

The weather has been totally bizarre today and so it’s cloudy one minute and then papers blow off the window sill and people’s hats float away in the breeze, and then it’s sunny and we’re lathering on the sunscreen. Saki, the reluctant English club leader, is standing in the middle of the arena, yelling at the top of her lungs in front of the whole school. This is the girl who cried when I asked her to give directions to six students. One more thing about English club that is funny: we have an English club leader, a third year student, and yet the third year students aren’t allowed to come to clubs. So this year we have two de-facto second year students who do all the work without any of the recognition. But I know when the time comes to pass the torch neither of them will want the title. There will be tears. I just don’t GET it.

Sports Day practice is like watching high-speed yoga. Mountain pose! Triangle! Warrior! all to a really fast drum beat. It’s a fluid, but completely blocky dance. There’s a lot of screaming and punching one’s fist into the air. Behind them, the students flipping panels are just getting into the swing of things. Their kanji, written over 20 people, six rows deep, is sloppy. They need to get a little crispness into their wrist action. And that’s my professional opinion.

We’ve been having classes only in the mornings, and so yesterday I regaled the Natural English class with my stories of getting my Japanese driver’s license. “And then I failed for not moving the steering wheel to the right place, and then I failed for not moving to the left side of the left lane 30 feet before a turn, and then I failed for not looking under the car,” I sad.

Green Tea Sensei, hovering on the side of our circle (She refuses to sit down, claiming it makes her tired) said, “You should write a book!”

All in good time.

Then, today, we told the debate students that we were bringing out evaluation sheets and they needed to BRING IT to get everything checked off. Speech long enough? Cross-examination convincing? And if they didn’t meet all the requirements they had to just keep debating forever until they died.

“We’ll tell you what you did wrong,” I said, “and then we want you to fix it. And if you don’t fix it then your team will have to keep debating until you do fix it.”

“Kind of like you and the driving test?” Green Tea Sensei quipped from the back of the classroom.

Oh, you cool drink of water.

My wardrobe is slowly migrating to my locker at school. For Sports Day practice in the afternoons we all change from our pleated pants and linen shirts into track suits and sweatshirts. Even though The Sensei don’t do anything besides monitor the students’ health. We stand around while they march and stretch, and then we all go back inside to our computers. Yesterday, Gregory Peck Sensei, standing next to Praju and I, asked if we had put on sunscreen. “We forgot,” we both said, “but it’s not even sunny.”

“But for women,” Gregory Peck Sensei said, “this is impossible!”

Praju and I were both squinting in the afternoon light, having left our sunglasses at home. Next to us, the female teachers wore boat hats and long-sleeved track jackets and white gloves. Only our arms were bare to the piercing cloud-covered sun.

I’ve been hanging my shirts and pants in my locker at school, and then I simply wear my Sports clothes home. The result is that come July, when we’re packing odds and ends and sending boxes home by the carton, I’m going to clean out my locker at school and instead of finding an old bottle of contact solution and a black blazer–what’s usually in there–it’s going to be stuffed with capri pants and black linen and polo shirts.

Read Full Post »

Flying horses couldn’t keep me away

The Sports Day scaffolding has been assembled in the arena. Praju reports students have locked off classrooms down a musty hall and filled them with the fledgling efforts of their massive billboard sized paintings. I see a few third year students wandering the halls like Lady MacBeth, their hands covered in red paint. Leaders have been selected. Classes have been re-scheduled. Starting next week we will have classes until lunchtime and then four hours of Sports Day practice in the afternoons. The Sensei (including me) are busy correcting mid-terms and marking essays, so these half day reprieves come at a good time in the term. We will do busy work inside and through our screened windows monitor the students flapping cards and dancing around in capes. All of us hope it will not rain.

I’ve been on sick leave for the last two weeks, in and out of school. Did you know all the massage therapists at The Massage Place wear white button-up coats that look like chef’s jackets? And solid white polyester pants? And the female receptionists wear baby pink aprons with their names written in hiragana so the little children know what to call them? It’s kind of cute in a cutesy way, and I now associate the color pink with all things medical. There is always pink somewhere in a doctor’s office over here. Pink slippers. Pink massage tables. Pink aprons. Is this meant to be soothing?

Also, there are only male massage therapists and only female receptionists. But hey, when I get a 10-minute foot bath followed by a 15-minute shoulder massage followed by 10 minutes with the octopus electric massage suckers all for 500 yen ($5) I wouldn’t care if it was administered in the 99-year-old woman’s smelly basement. I’ve been in and out of The Massage Place for the last ten days, and yesterday when they asked me how I was doing I was able to honestly say I’m “much better”.

I’ve been home the last three days resting up on the couch, reading, slowly (and I mean really slowly) packing our winter clothes boxes. I strategized. I developed a yoga routine. I figured out when I can go swimming and how often I need to do it. I finished two stories that have been in the back of my mind and eating up space in my sub-conscious. I have, in short, just come out of a spring hibernation. I washed dishes, lengthened my hamstrings and ate leftovers. I also got a little perspective, which makes me freak out a little less when I see on a neighbor’s email “status” the phrase: eight weeks left.

Eight weeks!

Eight weeks.

Back at school I’m eating my sandwich out of a bag that says I may put these things in it: carrots, broccoli, apples, sausage, candy, cheese. We’re getting tempermental plastic over here as summer approaches.

The three Board of Education professionals come in during lunchtime in black suits and power shirts and suddenly all 50 of us, chairs rolling back in our wake, are on our feet and the Principal gives introductions. They roam around all afternoon and then disappear. We did a stretch of “emergency” cleaning for them, if you’ll remember, but I don’t believe any comments were made on how spiffy our shelves were. Disappointing.

The student teachers are also here. There are about two of them to every Sensei and they’re all wearing the same black suit. During the morning meeting they troop into the room carrying their own red stools to sit on. They don’t appear to have any other purpose than just observing. I’m keeping a watchful eye on them.

I showed the second year students my brother’s high school graduation announcement and they gave him the highest praise: “Cool”. They were very disappointed to hear he had a girlfriend. He does have facial stubble in his senior picture, which is something the boys here won’t have to deal with for many more years. The Asian face just does not sprout hairs like a North American mountain man.

I filled one of Johnathan’s old socks with rice and heat it up in the microwave for my shoulders. Several of the Sensei have commented on how “cute” his sort-of-dirty old sock is. I think my parting gift to a few of them may be beautiful cloth bags of rice that will sit sweating in their metal desk drawers all through August and September and October. Until November when I expect a few thank-you notes and anecdotes about healed muscles. These chairs we sit in. They are very bad for the back.

Ms. Delicious is very glad to have me back at school and gave me an awkward side hug this morning. “You are feeling better,” she said. To which I said, “Yes, I am.” I did 30-minutes of yoga this morning, took a shower, made my own lunch and was 15 minutes early to school. “What does this mean, ‘be fired up?'” Kana asked me in debate class, holding out her dictionary. And so I taught them the cheer, Let’s get fired up! We are fired up! and I expect to see it used at Class Match while their classmates are thumping volleyballs over the net.

I’m feeling good and it’s great to be back in the saddle where I get to tell T-Rex Sensei, “The magazine won’t carry an item about his scandal,” is wrong, and I get to tell O Sensei that the phrases, “We will clean up the park this weekend” and “we’re going to clean up the part this weekend” are virtually identical, and where Kana answers everything with the phrase, “I am impatient”. How are you doing? I asked the class and Kana shouted back, I am impatient! Well, then, Kana, let’s get this party started.

Read Full Post »

Upcoming attractions

We’re slowly transitioning from bright, sunny, happy days where I ride my bike joyfully to school into the “if it doesn’t rain” season. I’ve been quite pleased with all the sun. I get up earlier, I feel like the afternoons are much loooonger, I’m not trapped on our bed with nothing but a space-heater and a super electric blanket to keep me warm. The kitchen is no longer the frozen wasteland it was this December, February, MARCH (although you wouldn’t know it by the amount of dishes I leave strewn around. The husband finally said this morning, “can’t you just wash your cereal bowl after you eat breakfast?” and I tried to think of a snappy reason why I didn’t have time for that, but I was putting on purple eyeliner at the time and, really, the man doesn’t ask for much. AND he lives in the exploded garment factory that is our bedroom with nary a complaint. It really shows how much he’s adapted his Virgo-esque standards to mine that last night he said, happily, “I’m just glad you’ve kept the clothes mess all in one room.” Awww, love.)

Whereas last year I felt claustrophobic during the month of June, unwilling to sheath myself in plastic to make a quick milk run on my bike, this year I have a car. Which means freedom! If I want to drive to the Amakusa islands to search for dolphins like some great scene out of Moby Dick well then, by golly, pack your bags Hana! We’re leaving next weekend.

My calendar for the next two months is chock full of THINGS we’re doing. Eating lunch with Johnathan’s host parents from Tokyo, buying pearls, taking a trip to Miyazaki, the last prefecture we need to hit on our seven-prefecture-all-island tour. My school year has been all jumbled up in an effort to keep the students from wilting like bad fruit in the August sun, and so Sports Day is now June 14th! I’m immensely happy about this turn-around because it means I get to see the Superhero Class wearing traditional robes and painting dragons onto billboards, and this time they are the leaders and have all the control. Out of the 27 leaders from the third year class–nine for each color: Red, Yellow (me!), Blue (Praju!)–EIGHT of them are from the Superhero Class. This means that no matter which color makes 20 bodies appear like a writhing snake, a familiar face will be at the front. I will have a special backstage pass because I know all of their names and have seen many of the girls naked (at the hot springs in English camp, not because I am a peeping tom. In fact, THEY have seen ME naked, which no one seemed to think was weird, so I went with it.). If it doesn’t rain there will be practices every day from now on, and not the secret practices they had in April when no one was supposed to be planning. These are Sensei-approved and make my life exciting because it means whenever I turn a corner I could be surprised by a taiko drum and a boy in a red headband and silk robe pounding a tribal beat.

Also if it doesn’t rain we will be having the 100th anniversary baseball game next Wednesday. I have never seen baseball played in Japan, although it is one of my goals for this summer to see the Fukuoka Hawks showdown in their home stadium. Praju just unearthed the flyers from our stuffed boxes and is relaying the school news to me, via translation. We’ve known about this baseball game, but we didn’t know who we were playing until today. Are you ready for this? We’re playing Hana’s school! The school where the kids live and breathe baseball and wear their hair cropped short and swagger around like professionals. Versus my school where on rainy days the boys practice by hopping up and down the stairs on one foot. I’m not saying that’s easy–I tried it once, at their insistence–but we’re likely looking at the face of defeat, which is sad only because it’s the 100th anniversary baseball game! And parents and other alumni will be watching. No pressure or anything boys.

I currently have piles of very detailed and time-consuming projects scattered across my desk. Finding a way to secretly give pictures to 120 students so that their faces don’t end up all over the internet? Writing letters to the Superhero Class for my going away party in July? I’m very sensibly trying to cover all my bases in the next 6 weeks so that when the heat and torpor of July swings my way I’m not clocked in the head by a typhoon and put out of commission for days. There’s so much involved in leaving a place: cutting off the cell phones, getting rid of the stuff, healing our burned couch. We’re a bit paralyzed by the amount of work it involves. Actually, I’m paralyzed by it. Johnathan is busy on his computer because he’s already done all of the things on his list. In fact, he’s ditching most of his clothes here because the fish diet and long bike rides to elementary schools have caused him to slim down considerably, AND his pants are stained with chalk dust. We’re cutting our losses. I, on the other hand, am trying to stock up on white shirts and black pants and jeans and other things I don’t want to make myself in the next five years before I get a chance to come back to Asia.

Our current plan, did you know this? We’re moving to Australia in 2009. It feels so lackadaisical and full of whimsy to just move to a place and find work of some kind. Perhaps working with our hands in a cherry orchard. Perhaps serving coffee. Mostly we’re relying on the goodwill of my Australian host family from high school and my two amazing host brothers (one of whom is married: a couple to hang out with!) to help us scrounge up a life in Melbourne. They ask what do we need them to do to help? It’s not what we need, it’s what we don’t need that they should be asking. I mean, not only do we need an apartment, but we need to know where to buy toilet paper. Thank you two for the strong backs you’re going to let us lean on. After two years of serious suit-and-tie work molding the young minds of Japan we’re excited to ride trams and climb the largest rock in the world.

But those are plans for the future and this is supposed to be about Japan. Upcoming attractions: pearl-procuring, Sports Day, the Arita pottery teapot search committee, sappy good-byes. And exams. But that’s a given by now.

Read Full Post »

We built this city

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”?

Read Full Post »

Black faces and angry dinosaurs

When I get back from my two-week jaunt to Montana I find a small handwritten note on my desk: Peaquah Sensei, can you please find me the lyrics to the Sesame Street theme song before third period? Underneath it I find schedules for oral communication second term (my suggestion to teach the students superstitions and English haikus has been taken; my suggestion to have the students work at their own pace and monitor themselves has not). Gonzo Sensei, out with chronic back pain all summer, is now “out” indefinitely and she’s left cryptic outlines for the next six weeks. When I talk to Praju, the new ALT, and M&M Sensei, Gonzo’s replacement, they both shrug helplessly. We have a day and a half to choose six students to compete in the debate tournament this fall, record the speeches of two students hoping to move to the next round of an all-English speech contest, and an hour to find the Sesame Street theme song.

The internet is down. I try for twenty minutes to load google, only to come up with the error page, and then I call Jamie, who’s sitting in an office with The New People and the husband. She sings me the first verse over the phone and I press a scrap piece of paper against my thigh, trying to jot down the lines in the sweaty women’s locker room. In the end my writing blurs together and when I carry the fractured bits back to O Sensei she laughs and says: maybe you can just come sing it in class.

T-Rex Sensei storms around the staff room, blowing papers off desks as he clomps by. We must talk, he says, coming to a thudding halt beside my desk. I look down at my papers, shuffle them around a bit, and when I look up he’s gone–off to find a textbook, notes, I’m not sure, because he doesn’t re-materialize until the end of the day. Halfway between our desk he pauses, turns around, and as an afterthought yells: How was your vacation?

My students are tan from all their hours in the sun practicing for Sports Day, although when I see them they say: Sensei, look at how black we are! I know exactly how they got that black–from attending festivals like the Water Festival where old men in full-body fishnets and cardboard trains on their heads paraded up and down the main streets in K-Town waving pompoms in the air. Or from sitting through the afternoon sun to get good spots at the K-Town Fireworks where the explosions were so big we couldn’t see them with all our peripheral strength and so loud they echoed off the tin roofs of the food stalls. The students are horrified that I see this change in their coloring. It’s dangerous, they say, it’s unhealthy. And then, this morning in class, I tell them: Yes, it’s dangerous. Yes, it’s bad for you, but it’s just so cool. In America it is so cool. They shake their heads sadly, like I’m a cancerous cigarette salesman passing out “testers”. Then, tonight I know they’ll all bust out their face-whitening creams, and in a few months, in the midst of winter when I’m pasty and crusty and feeling colorless and unhealthy, they’ll think me my most beautiful.

When I’m traveling, up in the air with all those people, I tend to get the feeling that we’re all in it together, that we’re cut of the same cloth. Of course there’s a few outsiders–the Japanese couple in plaid shirts and khakis doing power squats outside the bathroom door, the angry flight attendants gossiping in the back of the plane, the children running willy-nilly up the aisles, pausing to point and laugh at my puffy oily face. And then, just as we’re landing, the older Japanese woman across the aisle from me presses a pillow to the side of her face and turns herself away from the window. The sun is streaming across the wing, and while the American sitting next to her looks down over Tokyo she squints her eyes shut and presses her cheek deeper in the blue gauze pillowcase. I crane my neck around her, trying to get a view of what all the fuss was about until suddenly I realize that it isn’t the landing, or the ear-popping, or a fear of heights that keeps her in the pinched position, but it’s the sun itself. The Great Big Sun coming up like a friendly dog to say hello, and she can’t even make eye contact, can’t even extend a limb to be lovingly bronzed. And I can’t help it–I’m American, I work in a place where finding the theme song to Sesame Street is my top priority of the day, I’m willing to “blacken” my skin for the sake of being cool–I lean out of my seat, into the aisle, and I let the sun hit me full-blast.

And that’s how I re-enter Japan.

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 »