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 »

Packing up, shipping out

Auntie and Linds are home, we assume, because we’ve been getting emails from them that say: You must have my Japanese fabric. It is nowhere! that are followed twenty minutes later with oh! I just found it in the side pocket of my suitcase. Don’t worry! to which I want to say once and for all that we have scoured the apartment and have found no hair ties, no spare glasses, no extra fabric. NOTHING WAS LEFT BEHIND. We did find a curling iron burn on our grey pleather (I know) couch and as I was eating dinner the other night a shard of glass worked its way into my foot, so thank you for ruining our furniture and nearly causing a visit to the emergency room. We had a good time with you, too.

But I am kidding! and Linds if you ever read this, I mean, if the City of Phoenix doesn’t call this site “forbidden” and then phone you to explain yourself (true story, folks)–thank you for the note we got in the mail the other day. We particularly liked the purikura picture of you and Auntie in an ice cream sundae. I mean, if you’re leaving Japan with a good grasp of the purikura scene–our job is basically done.

We’ve been getting back into the swing of getting up early and taking trips to pottery towns in the rain. I purchased a nice sake set for my husband who doesn’t drink sake. That’s how much I like the pottery. I’m actively working to convince myself that five teapots is a good place to stop. FIVE TEAPOTS. Not to mention the number of small, handle-less teacups I’ve bought over the last two years. We have a luggage scale to ensure that our checked baggage is under 50 pounds, but I’d better hope no one notices me sweating as a heft my carry-on onto the security belt because it will have, at a minimum, 25 individual pieces of pottery nestled inside it.

The reality that we’re leaving K-town in two and a half months (right in the middle of typhoon season) is starting to sink in. We’ve been somewhat careful in accumulating things (except disregard that statement entirely when it comes to pottery) and yet we have so many THINGS. Wooden old people dolls, fabric cranes, towels with snow-covered cherry blossoms on them, cute plastic bowls, magnets, posters. MY BOOK COLLECTION. I have a master plan (by which I mean I’ve made lots of lists), and yet my main strategy appears to be surveillance. Piles of white polo shirts and short linen pants surround our bed and spill over into the living room and instead of sorting through my moth-nibbled sweaters and making room for the summer clothes in the closet I just hop between the shirts, reach into a stack to pull out a t-shirt and hope the whole thing doesn’t crash down in a fluffy cotton pile.

The husband is less than enchanted with this situation. He sorted his winter clothes into geometric bundles and secured them with twine. He asks me, “should I take these to a second hand shop or recycle them this morning?” while I’m wearing mismatched socks and smelling my undershirt to see if it’s clean. I’m eyeing my clothes to see what will make the boat home. I can tell, with a quick glance, whether a certain article of clothing has been washed in our disastrous excuse for a washing machine. The fabric will be faded and the sleeves so stretched out that the armpit holes hang down to mid-bicep. So I’ve decided no new clothing will be washed in Japan! I will save what cotton I can! I know it’s a naive resolution to make headed into the hottest and muggiest season of the year when I strip naked in the afternoons and sit, after school, panting under the air conditioner (not as sexy as it sounds), but this is the beginning of my detachment process. Most people pull away from friends and loved ones and gird their hearts in preparation for departure. Not me! I stop washing my clothes and spend my weekends buying ceramic plates in the shape of bamboo stalks.

This plan does cause me to wonder if I’ll get home and wish all my clothes looked faded and spun into felt by our machine. If I’d rather my shirts had small white lint balls from the polluted air and the stiff feel of shirts hung dry in the sun than look like regular American clothes. I mean, what better way to throw into a conversation that I used to live in Japan than in response to the question, “what happened to your pants?”

“Oh,” I’ll say modestly, “it’s just my washer in Japan, where I lived, used to eat these holes into the hem of all my pants. And this hole in the shoulder of my shirt? That’s from a poisonous centipede that crept up on me while I slept. Man, I miss it there.”

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 »

Three day weekend

We’ve just come off a three-day weekend with a typhoon that wasn’t even strong enough to pick me up and toss me about like a leaf. I mean, typhoon #4 of the season didn’t really live up to all the hype. Trains were closed down at 1:00, and we sat in our apartment and watched the winds push the clouds from one side of the sky to the other, then, around 8:00 when we noticed no discernible change, the train conductors grudgingly flipped the electricity on the tracks and all of Japan resumed its complicated industry of shipping expensive peaches from the bottom to the top. I imagine they peeked outside the little windows on the front car of the trains and thought, “hmmm…I guess we made a mistake. Oh well, maybe no one will notice.” Well I noticed! No train service for seven hours! Where do we live…America?” Pull it together Nishitetsu train company. Stiff upper lip and all that.

So we all returned to school this morning wind-whipped but otherwise mostly rested and in full possession of the wonderful things we did yesterday for Marine Day. I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be a day at the sea, but it was overcast all day and rained in the morning and we didn’t want to make the trek to the beach only to be greeted with a grey, grey, choppy sea that was tossing up the seasonal jellyfish with abandon. Mostly we stayed inside and watched episodes of the West Wing, but that’s a whole other story on how I guiltily feed my tv addiction and abuse my vacation days in Japan.

The point of all of this is to tell you that we got to school today and everything seemed Tuesday normal. I said my good mornings, stamped myself in and then sat down at my desk to wait for the 8:30 bell. At the 8:30 bell all the teachers stand up and bow to the vice-principal. Today the bell rang, we all stood up and…the vice principal was nowhere to be seem! Chaos! Everyone did a little half-sit-down-half-stand-up squat, putting our hands out behind us to grab at our chairs, like, no, I didn’t stand up to bow to an empty chair, what are you talking about? Then the vice-principal came through the door, stopped, looked at the clock, and said, “oh”. A few teachers giggled, then stood up. He waved us off. We sat down. Then the principal walked through the door and we all stood up again. The vice-principal waved us down and we did the squatting dance while we tried to figure out when we could stand up and not be reprimanded. It all ended in a usual way. Much bowing. Most of us bowing three or four times as we slid back into our chairs, and the short morning announcements.

I’m not sure if it was the typhoon that threw us all off, or the holiday yesterday where the teachers likely came to school and slept at their desks while the students took tests. But the week has started, and judging from this morning it might be awhile before we’re back on our game.

Read Full Post »

Typhoon Prep

We’re in typhoon prep. It’s the first serious typhoon warning of the season and it marks the violent transition from the rainy season to the hot rainy season. We’re trying to beat back August with a large stick, but the humidity is so clotted and thick that it halts my stick in mid-air. It’s like trying to beat pudding. I’ve been talking a lot about the weather recently, haven’t I? I have some theories as to why that may be.

I’ve never before experienced seasons that have, in a very mean-spirited way, taken my life and shaken it like a snow globe. First it was the abomidable snowman’s grip of winter, and now the fiery heat of a sauna in the Sahara. If it rained in the Sahara. Oh the rain! Never before has my life been so dictated to, so sat down for a scolding. There are all kinds of rules I’m supposed to follow with regards to the rain and when I can go out and what can I wear, and I resent this imposition on my creativity.

I’m not a pussy-foot or person who expects there to be lily pads on which I can transverse the placid lake of spring. But I have always experienced the upper-hand, the ability to tease weather, and then laugh in the corner, sipping a cup of tea, while it pounds and hurls itself against the windows, trying to get in. Weather was just something that happened, but never something that mattered.

We’re very uppity about our weather in Montana. When people in neighboring states get an inch or snow or a thin frosty layer we turn up our noses. That’s not snow, we say, that’s cake frosting, powdered sugar, a fake-out. You want to see real snow then be a real man and move to the Rocky Mountains. People strap around in carharts and snowsuits, wear ski masks to drive around town, have chains clanking around in their trunks in June you know, just in case. Just in case they pick up an out-of-town relative at the airport and can say well, you just never know around here. Snow in June. It’s happened. And the relative with wring their hands and wail about what a temper mental life we lead, how brave we must be. We put on our sunglasses, ram our suburbans into gear and click into 4-wheel drive, just to show off.

But weather never took me hostage in Montana. Here, there’s a typhoon and the whole country shuts down. Trains stop running, stores close at 3pm, and the tv switches to 24-hour weather advisories. The only people out driving around the canals are crazy taxi drivers who have to ferry people caught on little pockets of dry land from their office to their home and back again. Typhoons here smash people’s windows, which seems to me an unnecessary invasion of my privacy, like a burglar has busted up my window and then leapt off the balcony. They didn’t really come to take anything, just cause me problems. It’s like I’m sitting, waiting for the burglar to show up, and then when it does not only do I let it bust my window, but I have to prepare for other disasters, like no water for three days and no way to flush the toilet.

This one already called down rain last night as a warning, so we know it’s coming. Yesterday was steamy and hot and then after dinner crash, bam! Lightning going off right over our heads and the rain fell in curtains. It was like being on a sound stage with the volume turned to natural disaster. Businessmen in the parking lot behind our building sat and waited in their cars, unwilling to walk the 100 feet to their apartments. We watched it for awhile from our balcony, but eventually the humidity became so oppressive we feared we were going to come down with an African fainting illness, so we scuttled back inside.

We’re in the eye of the storm now. We had a little rain tease this morning, heavy enough I had to suit up in full-scale rain gear to ride to school, and now it is calm and quiet. Even the palm tree trees outside the teacher’s room are still. There’s not a lot my resentful self can do except to go home tonight and fill up water bottles, make sure we won’t have chicken rotting in our freezer if we lose power, and then just wait for the typhoon to take its sweet time to come a callin’.

Read Full Post »

Weather or not, here I come

Just yesterday I was feeling like a sun-hardened prairie woman, afraid one day I’d walk outside to bleached cattle skeletons scattered across the yard like gruesome jungle gyms. I lived through about seven years of drought in Montana, and now that I’m on the other side of the Pacific Rim the grass on the ranch is thigh-high, The Rabbit Slayer floats the creek every night and there’s a plague-worthy infestation of frogs that leap out of the way as the folks walk through the fields. Here, the rainy season has turned its back on us. There’s much paranoia about the rice and tea crops. I’ve seen this thirsty look in people’s eyes before, as we all watch the sky during the afternoons. In Montana this meant firefighters and states of disaster. In Japan it means the humidity clogs my lungs like a bad drain. My chest feels tight, like I’ve been swaddled in a cotton blanket. We can’t get rid of the sticky pre-rain feeling.

Johnathan ran a cold bath after work yesterday and later called it a “temporary solution”. Our pricey watermelon went rancid after a day on the kitchen table. We have to watch our bread carefully, waiting for the diseased spots of mold to pop up. I have red mosquito bite welts on my calves and in the juicy, sweaty, crooks of my arms. Biking home yesterday the warm wind was against me so I pedaled with extra vigor. So much vigor that by the time I got home I was puffing and drooling sweat. When I got into the apartment I couldn’t figure out what to take off first, so I pulled the curtains and stripped naked, and I stayed that way most of the night. Life is a lot easier when you’re naked. It’s only the end of June and already the humidity is breathing its hot, halitosis breath on the back of our necks.

As a person who bikes to work and hates to ride in the rain I never thought I’d say this: Rainy season, old cool friend, what have we done to merit such displeasure?

Read Full Post »

When the sky threatens me

They count years differently here. This school year is Heisei 19; we’d be in the 7th year of Bush back home. I staunchly refuse to adhere to this and make all my students date their papers in the 2007s. It’s part cultural assimilation (for them) and partly because admitting the year is decided by how long the emperor has been in charge seems, well, weird. Like everything that happened before 19 years ago (i.e. the 80’s) is just a fleeting blip on the radar, not important for the here and now. Seeing all the “19s” stamped next to the kanji for year makes me feel like I’ve stepped into a fictional book world, the world of Harry Potter or The Tale of Genji where anything can happen, or like I live in another period of history altogether. By this I mean pieces of bread can fly around on tv and a blue cat who drank poison can pull anything it wants out of a secret kangaroo-like pouch. The calendars are different, the school year starts and ends in April, and the unbearable humidity that has descended upon us like a fog makes me feel hazy and drugged, like all the smoke in the air from the piles of burning garbage actually has a chemical agent to erase my memories. It feels like even the weather has been coerced into following a complicated, new calendar.

There’s much talk these days about how the rainy season has pulled a fast one with its belated appearance. It is unacceptable. We should be sloshing around knee-deep in a Kurume-sized lake by now, and instead it’s only barely necessary to bring rain gear to school. The rules have been broken, and everyone is confused, wandering aimlessly to their cars when they should be running, clutching plastic bags over their heads. It’s as though a silent contract has been broken, and the Sensei aren’t quite sure if they can depend on the seasons to do their jobs properly, in the exact time alloted. The opening ceremony has started and the guest speaker speaker called from the highway to say he’d be late. So we’re all kneeling in the gym, waiting in the confusion, the Japanese way.

Yet, the rainy season hasn’t completely abandoned us. The rain trickles all day and then there’s a sudden outburst right before I leave to bike home. Most of the time it doesn’t come down heavy enough to justify donning my blue plastic rain gear, but when I ride in it a light fuzz of water builds up on my sweaters and pants. I can see why duck feathers have a slicking quality. Yet, full-blown rain gear feels like a gross overreaction. So I see professional women steering their bikes with one hand, holding an umbrella over their heads with the other as they dodge between cars. Or my students cycling around in psychedelic rain boots and their black wool uniforms. I usually just beat the rain to school, and then watch all day as the clouds “threaten us” as T-Rex Sensei says. There is some window-splatter at lunchtime, and while it doesn’t clear up altogether the sky turns a lighter shade of gray in the afternoons. It is only around four, as I anxiously grip my snoopy bag, nervously watching the clock click towards 4:15, that the sky gets really dark. Then at 4:13 when I stand up to make a dash for it, sure I can just make it home, the downpour starts. I sit down dejectedly to wait it out.

The rain is on some kind of a schedule, but I fear it has adapted itself to me in the 2007s and now follows my day like a bloodhound, waiting to rain on my parade. Why the rain waits until 4:15 to come down like a gate, keeping me at school, I can’t say for sure. But it feels like my Japanese colleagues must be conspiring with the freakish toast man in the sky who controls the weather, trying to push me, encourage me, and then force me into Hesei 19 where the world is orderly and numbered and the season arrive on their due date. They’re trying, by the power of typhoons, 4:15 showers and wild wind, to make me sit at my desk, like a normal Japanese teacher, and patiently wait until 9:00 when I can bike home under suspiciously blue rain-free skies.

Read Full Post »

What happens when we sweat

I should probably be taken out to the palm trees and beaten with an English-Japanese dictionary for lecturing to my oral communication class for the last forty minutes. I try to be entertaining–I get a few laughs showing them how I had to weave through the halls in a five minute passing period at a high school with 2,000 students. But it’s before lunch time, their heads are bobbing, and when I ask how they are a boy from the back shouts: Very hot! Indeed. After I finish running through the rigamarole of how high school in America is different from Japan I’m sweating, because the 9th reason, the reason I couldn’t tell them, is that in America we have air conditioning WHENEVER WE WANT. We don’t believe uncomfortableness builds character.

We’re entering the sleepy period of summer, when things just don’t seem as urgent as they did in steely, exam-riddled winter. We teachers are allowed to wear “cool biz” which means polo shirts and capri pants, although the teachers all wear these with nylons and sweaters, so I’m not sure who they’re kidding. Our students are in short-sleeved button-up shirts, minus the heavy navy blazers, and the girls have to be constantly reminded to keep their skirts rolled down over their sweaty knees. I find it hard, for forty minutes, to keep my own attention, let alone the prespiring masses in front of me.

Whose classroom is this? I shout, wandering among the desk. Is it mine? Mount Fuji Sensei’s? Whose desk is this? Whose books are these? They stare at me as they would a gorilla rooting through their gym bag. An interesting pet, perhaps, but not one that needs to be adressed.

I’m trying to show them the differences, that the classrooms in Japan belong to the students, that their time table is different every day, that it’s not everywhere in the world that students come to school from seven to seven. That it’s possible to enjoy baseball without playing it every day for three years. They can’t get their head around the fact that high school students in America don’t clean. Our school is beautiful because students clean it, I catch one girl writing, and I have to remind her that OUR schools can be beautiful as well. Why is it better for the students to clean? I ask and she shrugs. It’s not on the tip of their tongues because it’s just the way it’s always been.

I really get them to gasp when I announce summer vacation. Three months of no homework, not studying. If you’re a very, very bad student, I say, you have to come to summer school. They hem and haw because these kids were all selected at Kurume High School for being the antithesis of a bad student. They wouldn’t even know how to go about it. Even now, two students are buzzing around the teacher’s desk, asking extra credit grammar questions. Their brains are like sponges.

And sponges indeed they are. But if we’re failing them in a way–if I’m failing them with my long lectures, my antics–it’s in getting them to spurt out their knowledge. They’re all right at writing, and we’re working on on getting them to give good reasons, but they’re completely unpracticed at giving answers.

Is this your desk? I ask one startled girl and she hides her eyes behind her hair. She shakes with nervousness. What clubs do you do? I ask and no one answers. I break it down: Who does clubs? and no one raises their hands.

At our ALT meetings we often talk about our students ability to translate, their intimate knowledge of English grammar, and yet I’m still getting the response: I’m fine, thank you, and you? when I ask how they are, even though I’ve cajoled them a half dozen times. ANY OTHER ANSWER, I say. And they say: Thank You.

Because at the end of the day, no matter how much I lecture instead of give them time to talk, no matter how many essays they write, even if Mount Fuji shouts at them in Japanese, they still have to stand up at the end of the class, bow, and say: Thank you, Sensei.

I just wish they were thanking me for something more worthwhile.

Read Full Post »

Don’t lick the walls

Japan, as a country, is not known for its environmentally sound practices. People burn huge pyres of debris and rubbish they don’t feel like sending to the official incinerator every weekend. We suspect there is an official day to do this, but no one either adheres to that or lets us know. What happens is this: on windy days the smoke from burning fields, old milk cartons and used clothing blows into Kurume (and around Kurume) and it smells like we’re living in the valley of the chain smokers. We have to leave the windows at school open because, let’s face it, it’s hot enough to use the air conditioner, but we haven’t been officially “approved” (and won’t be until July 1st) so the whole teacher’s room smells like the sad smoking closet where the men huddle around one table littered with ash trays and smack their elbows against the walls of the tiny, nicotine-stained room. I guess I’d gotten used to the dry eyes, the chronic runny nose, the way my eyebrows are nearly singed off every time I ride home by the crazy grandmother with the bonfire pit in the middle of her zen garden, and then we got the news that our apartments are probably, no, most likely, made up of asbestos.

We’re a group that lives in a state of suspecting the wool has been pulled over our eyes. People are always keeping things from us, springing stuff on us at the last minute, giving us only the essential details. Johnathan sends me a text this morning: my whole school is going to the Kyushu Orchestra today–field trip! I feel like an old-world scholar trying to sort through the papers in my box. Is this about culture day? Am I supposed to be somewhere Friday night? For the moment kanji are simply symbols I recognize, like a stop sign. Imagine, if you will, having a radio on at your desk all day. In Chinese. Eventually you learn to just tune it out, to hear the dips and rhythms like music, but not like an actual language to, you know, communicate. Coming out of an assembly last Friday O Sensei, my supervisor, turned to me and said, “so, do you understand–fifty percent of what was said?” I laughed. “More like ten percent,” I said, “if I’m really listening.” I can only really listen for a short period of time and then, zap, a teacher gets up to slap the back of a sleeping student’s head, and my brain starts synapsing back and forth in English. Once I’ve broken the reverie, it’s hard to pick it back up. It’s like coming in in the middle of a song and trying to figure out what the second verse means cold turkey. It turns out I’d missed The Big Kahuna raving about his badminton days, how when he was a teacher he led the badminton club to glory. Then he’d passed out certificates and bows for the glorious badminton stars this year. This is what I had heard: Badminton. Congratulations. Thank you.

There was a lot of standing up, sitting down and bowing, but as you can see, much is lost in the translation.

The point is, we’re skeptics. We never quite believe people are telling us the truth, and when things like the asbestos crop up we feel justified in our suspicions. What hidden piece of body language aren’t we picking up? What tone of voice can’t we read? When they’re all drunk at our office parties, swirling around the room with huge bottles of beer, telling me I’m a great teacher, what are they really saying, and how do we break the code? What is going on behind our backs? We are paranoid people are talking about us. We are celebrities the children shout “hello” to. Where other people stick out for their badminton achievements I stick out for my brown hair, and that makes me an easy target. Fudge the truth a little for the foreigner, because the truth is, I’ll never know.

There have been a few chronic cases of pneumonia among the ALTs this winter. We’re in spring, and hitting the spring diseases (a kid at my school went home with measles), but two ALTs haven’t been able to kick their mucusy coughs, haven’t been able to leave their spit cups at home, and so one night at dinner they got to talking about our old, old apartment buildings, and how Japanese codes still are, well, not up to code, and the thought struck their brains that perhaps this lung disease wasn’t the result of no insulation or riding our bikes in the rain, but was instead the result of, you guessed it, ASBESTOS.

So they contacted our advisor who, in traditional Japanese fashion, shot the news up the totem pole, and after a few days, a week, the answer travelled back to her (it’s a bit slow, like the pony express) and she passed it on to us. But of course there’s asbestos, silly chickens, why the long faces?

What will happen? we asked. Will they be torn down? Re-built?

It’s difficult, ne? the superior’s superior’s say, the elusive ones who control the air conditioning. Then they laugh and laugh.

As ALTs we stand around wondering what other faulty equipment lurks in our dusty pre-war apartments. Lead paint? Copper pipes? Arsenic-scented kitchen ware?

Matt, who lives in the apartment below us, sends out this memo: the fibers aren’t going to leak through the walls, so its only a problem if you punch a hole in the wall, stick your head in, and take a deep breath.

The lung-ailed ALTs email back: Can I blame my early death on the Japanese government? Can we say “class action lawsuit?”

It’s a problem in Japan, the AC controllers write back.

We’ve been hoodwinked, suckered in, exposed in more ways than one. Perhaps the house out back that faces all our windows can watch us, ant-farm like, collapsing in our kitchens or across the pesticide soaked balconies. And until I figure out what to do about this, how serious asbestos is, if its grainy powder can waft through our walls, I’m going to stick to sitting in the middle of the room, refusing to take a shower in our copper-tainted water, and above all else, stopping myself from licking our walls.

Read Full Post »

Typhoon

We had a typhoon this weekend. It hit Sunday and closed down everything. I mean trains, buses, stores, you name it. Taxis were the only moving vehicles still running, so Johnathan and Jamie and I had to take a $120 cab ride home to Kurume from Fukuoka City. The wind picked up and rocked the car around a bit on the highway. This morning there were leaves all over our driveway. We got notices that this was supposed to be the worst typhoon to hit Kyushu in the last ten years, and everyone warned us to keep a low profile. Put our bikes inside so they weren’t picked up and smashed against our windows. That sort of thing. People bought out all the bread at the supermarket and taped big X’s across their windows to keep them from shattering. One of our neighbors called from Kitakyushu to have us look off our balcony to see if his laundry had blown away. Mostly I sat in the air-tight apartment and watched ER episodes all weekend. I finished season three and am now on season four. We made a loaf of bread and watched the clouds roll in, the rain pour, and the clouds roll out again. No thunder, no lightning, no crying babies or runaway laundry. Frankly, I thought a typhoon would be a little more exciting.

Read Full Post »