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.

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Identity wheedling

I’m not usually in the teacher’s room for cleaning time. I have my own fish to fry and desks to casually lean against and rain to contemplate in the English room. I’ve trained those students so well that they don’t even snap to attention when I rattle the key and open the door. Instead they lazily go to the whiteboard, pick up markers, and start doodling. Then, when Green Tea Sensei pops her head in to ask us a question or ask for some late homework, we all look around with our scared eyes and elbow each other, and I pretend like I’m doing something besides talking to Kanako about the latest Harry Potter movie. But today the PTA is setting up for a combo Christmas party/farewell party for our German exchange student, and so I leisurely ate my lunch and watched the students empty the teacher’s garbage cans and halfheartedly sweep between our desks. Then, one of the vice-vice principals lifted the top off the shredder and three boys rushed over with garbage sacks and they filled them to the brim. I’ve occasionally seen the tail-end of this operation, and it always amazes me that we shred three full Peaquah-sized bags of paper in a day.

After cleaning time we were requested to make a visit to the Superhero class where we accidentally sprang on them the fact that they have English listening winter homework. “Surprise!” I yelled and everyone laughed. “Come and do it with us!” we sang, because DEBATE SEASON is over and I’m having a hard time trudging to my car everyday past the students who are now back at clubs. “Please,” Gonzo Sensei said, “don’t tell them it was my idea. Or they’ll just think I’m the dragon lady telling them what to do.” But it slipped out that it wasn’t our idea, exactly, to assign them 12 listening exercises, that we were just the medium to alleviate their madness. “Please don’t wait until the night before and listen for three hours,” I said. And when I asked, “do you understand?” as we stepped off the stage and out the door, the Superhero class sucked in a deep breath and yelled, “yes!” so loudly they had enough sound for themselves and enough to share with 1-2, The Class Who Never Speaks.

Back in the teacher’s room the students are lined up behind O Sensei’s desk, waiting for her to cut and paste and check off their names for grammar assignments. One girl with a birthmark the shape and color of a black eye gives me a three-fingered wave. Two boys lean over O Sensei’s desk and stare at me. “Oh!” they say. “Hi boys,” I say, and they do a bobble-headed bow. I think the students aren’t quite sure where I live–in the teacher’s room, in the small closet off the English room, in the 1-1 classroom, and so it’s a surprise to see me in the halls, on my way to the bathroom, getting my shoes after school. It’s as though I’m a partially invisible ghost who wanders through the halls mostly undetected unless you’re looking right at me, and then I’m quite surprising, like “oh, I forgot you lived here”.

I’m racked with regret that I didn’t take the five minutes in the Superhero class to congratulate the debate team for their 4th place at All-Kyushu. I spent that stressful, weepy day with them, and I’ve been sifting through my thoughts with a pinch in an email, a pound in my journal, and I’m just not quite ready to explain more than that. When I stop crying when I go home and can watch the track and field team without a nostalgic buzzer going off in my head, then I will write, dear Internet, about the three students who have forever welded themselves to my heart. Until then, you can know my heart has been turned into a gold star, and I wear it on my sleeve, so proud am I of how much they worked and what our teamwork accomplished. I’m in the throes of planning a debate closing ceremony complete with certificates and pictures and three hand-written letters, and maybe then I can express to them that this is my best memory of Japan, that they’re the first students to make me cry, that I’m so sorry the dark late nights and dictionary conversations are over. But most of all that I found out at the Saturday tournament that Ryosuke likes a second year girl, but now we no longer have the time together or the joking relationship for me to wheedle her identity out of him.

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Big Debate News

Resolution: All primary and secondary schools in Japan should have classes on Saturday.

Unlike last year where we had to trudge away in the rain, this year my students stayed for the entire debate tournament. Why you wonder?

BECAUSE WE TOOK SECOND!

This means that instead of debate being finished/finito/owari we are now contenders for the All-Kyushu title (tournament December 8th), and I have to start generating fake affirmative speeches at an alarming rate. I don’t have brain power to write too much more since my thighs are so sore I can’t cross my legs from a 16 km walk I did yesterday with the 1-1 homeroom. Think of it this way: it’s essentially like taking second at a state tournament in a state with five times the population of Montana. Out of five million people, our team is number two. It’s quite an honor and all the teachers at school have been patting my arm all morning, saying “thank you, Sensei.” Praju and I went up to the Superhero homeroom to watch the team tell the rest of their class and the students clapped and cheered. The debaters couldn’t hide their proud smiles.

The hi-lites:

• On the way to the debate Ryosuke, our single boy, got a flyer for a womens’ college.
• In the gas station where we bought our lunches in the morning I was patting everyone’s backs and arms, trying to encourage them. One girl looked around in surprise and we all realized she didn’t belong to our school. They teased me about it all day.
• As soon as they broke into the final match they burst into tears and we were hugging and jumping around the room. I grabbed Mio so hard we tipped into a table.
• They lose in the final round (their fourth match of the day) on the affirmative side. They’d won the previous three on the negative side. I approached their table after it was over and asked, “what happened?” Ryosuke shrugged. “Three times negative,” he said, “our brains couldn’t switch.”
• At the end of the debate the other ALT judges came up to say how unique our arguments were, how much they liked our team. (FYI: I wrote most of their negative argument.) “Peaquah Sensei,” the debate team said, “we didn’t realize how smart you are.” I tapped the side of my head, “now you know,” I said, and we all laughed.
• After it’s over the judges ask Ryosuke what he really thinks. He looks at the other two girls on his team. “Of course we don’t want to go to school on Saturdays,” he says, and we all laugh. “When we heard this resolution we thought we are really, really negative.”

We took them out for ice cream and pictures afterward and as we ate our sundaes I watched the lights go out in Ryosuke’s head. They’d gotten back from New Zealand the night before, and not only was it a feat they’d pulled off, but it was one they’d pulled off with 10 hours of jet lag on them. “I’m really lagging,” Ryosuke said when I asked him if he was tired from the plane. As soon as the final match was over his energy level plummeted, and I felt for him, for the work he’d put in to get them to that level. He won second place for them with all his flow charts and logical thinking. In the first round the ALT coach leaned over to ask, “how did he get so good?” I shrugged. “We don’t really know. We just pointed him in the right direction.” I remembered the rides back from speech contests in high school, how we stood in the gym of Bozeman/Helena/Butte High getting our certificates and then we all piled onto the bus for the ride back and I’d fall asleep, my nose pressed against the bus’ window. I saw that same relief on Ryosuke’s face after it was all over, that he could flip through his New Zealand pictures without the debate tension like a cloud in his head. And that made it all worth it. Because that level of relief? That drop in energy and ensuing exhaustion? That means he’d pushed himself as hard as he could, he gave the number one team a run for their money, and he came out the other side gripping a handle on the train, his head on his chest, finally able to sleep off a bit of that New Zealand lag while we all poked him from behind, reminding him NOW it’s time to PARTY.

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School of fish class

About once a month the Sensei take out their blue whiteboard markers and march over to the glass-covered master schedule where they hover, nudging each other, drawing complicated spidery lines with pointed arrows. They’re changing the schedule. It’s not permanent and it usually doesn’t affect me too much–a second period class moved to sixth period, a third period class to first. They’re trying to pass back all the October mid-term exams before Praju and I see the inside of a classroom, which means that today instead of having only one oral communication lesson, I have three.

Usually each week I teach the same oral communication lesson to three 40-student homerooms; classes are spaced out over three days so there’s ample time for revision and essay corrections, but all three classes were moved back-to-back this morning. Which means tomorrow morning I’ll be looking at 120 hastily-written essays on volunteer work.

It should be the perfect case study for improvement, how I go from one classroom to the next improving my schpeel, explaining concepts more clearly. In some sense it does work like this. We’re reading two “articles” (penned by Praju and I) about volunteer work in Japan and abroad, but no amount of do you understands can coax the students into telling us that yes they do, it’s all quite clear, or no, and what is volunteer work anyway? I have them read the articles aloud, just under their breath, and O Sensei and I wander up and down the aisles, putting our ears up to their lips. “Just a little louder,” I keep saying, giving them a thumbs up. I’m a patient teacher, I smile a lot, and when there’s just one oral communication class in a day I come back to my desk and eat a few nuts, and the protein brings back the energy that they suck out of me with their refusal to answer any questions.

But the three classes wore me out. By the third class I’m set for a showdown. They have six true/false questions to answer about the two articles, and although I wandered through the row and saw almost everyone had not only a answer, but the right answer, no one will volunteer to answer the questions. I stand with my arms crossed at the front of class. I clap my hands together. In the past two classes I’ve picked up the seating chart and selected a “volunteer”, but I’m tired of them thinking they can get away with their collective passivism.

Outside I can hear the P.E. classes either lapping the school with their “one, two” military song or the 2nd period boys hooting at baseball, the 4th period girls giggling during their soccer match. After one day of pouring rain, and and the freak cold snap of yesterday, today is pleasantly balmy. The light is a pale shade of yellow, just enough to be warm, but not the fluorescent strength of summer. A bat cracks against a ball. The boys with desks along the wall of windows whip their heads around, and stare down at their classmates running around small as chess pieces.

“The longer it takes to do this the shorter time you have to write your essays,” I say finally, with a half smile. O Sensei scrawls the sentences on the board. “They just learned that this morning,” she says, “it’s so nice that you used it.” I have no idea what they learn in their grammar classes–it’s a secret mishmash of sentences written alongside math equations to help them remember–but it pleases me to no end. In fact, we’ve had all sorts of these coincidences with our volunteer lesson. My article was about adopting children from other countries, and O Sensei informs me they’d just had a debate in Japanese about whether surrogacy should be made legal in Japan. I’d love to tell them about it, laugh about it together as a class, but I can’t even get them to take a chance on answering a question they have a 50% chance of getting right.

“Try, try!” I say over and over, and finally one boy raises his hand, and then a girl, and a third boy. We give them stamps on a card that boosts their OC grade, and I walk back to the front of the room. It takes us 20 minutes to extract all six answers, but I’m hoping this is the last time we have to play this game of chicken. My father once told me the average teacher wait time is three seconds, but I’ve found I’m willing to wait five minutes, seven, ten. O Sensei and I walk back to the teacher’s room laughing. “Japanese teachers are not that patient.”

I can tell how busy O Sensei is by how high her papers are stacked, and in the post-test days we almost can’t see each other when we’re both sitting down. She tilts her chin up to catch my eye during lunchtime and asks, “are you free next period?” I put my hands in my hair, stare at her, but no words come to mind. “Do you have class?” she asks again. I try to remember what day it is. I’m tired. My schedule comes to mind, but it’s been snipped and reassembled into something I don’t recognize. After a minute I shake my head, afraid she’s going to ask me to visit one of her classes. “Then we can talk,” she says. I nod.

In the afternoon the Senseis pull open the teacher’s room windows. It’s a beautiful day. The palm trees out front wave in the breeze and there’s a class on the soccer field shouting and laughing. Gonzo Sensei wanders over to my desk. “That’s my homeroom,” she says. I look outside and, sure enough, it’s the Superhero class throwing elbows and hip checks. We meander over to the window, put our elbows on the ledge and watch them. “They’re so excited,” she says. I hear the girls yelling to one another, the squeals as the ball gets close to the goal. They grab each others arms and swing around in circles. They’re the only homeroom that isn’t reshuffled each April, and so they’ve seen each other go from timid first years like their OC counterparts to people willing to dress in full-body American flag spandex suits. They’re a tight-knit group, and it shows in the third year English course during class match when the girls are cheering for each other, saying “drink it! drink it!” dancing up and down while the other third year homerooms are subdued, still feeling each other out.

A few weeks ago O Sensei confronted one of our OC classes, telling them it’s rude not to respond, that we’re only asking for a yes or no. “They said they understand,” she relayed. “They say they’re very sorry. They say they want to do better, that other Sensei tell them the same thing. They don’t understand how they’ve gotten like this.” I imagine them having this conversation with her, all of their faces blank and staring, and then suddenly together, like a school of fish, they find a voice. They’re not a class with a few stars, though O Sensei says this homeroom scores the highest on their English tests. They’re the kind of class that, when I ask a question, have to roll their eyes from side to side, checking the answers with their neighbors, and then the imperceptible wind of their collective thought will roll through the room and I’ll be able to snatch it from the air, like a wayward paper airplane. I don’t expect them to reach the Superhero class level who last Friday clapped wildly for one member after she gave an English speech in class. “It was amazing,” they told her over and over. “You’re really good.” She looked down at her desk shyly, fighting to keep a smile off her face.

All I need is a few of them to swim out of formation.

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One, two, three times a lady

I sort of forgot all about March Madness, not being currently located in a March-madness kinda place, until I clicked across it on the internet and then I thought: oh yeah, I forgot that it’s the time of year when my pathetic knowledge of basketball gets put shamefully in the spotlight. Also the way I feel when I’m keeping score for a game and someone leans over my shoulder to say: 13 and 19 aren’t 33. I KNOW, I say, I just had a bit of dip in the corner of my eye. Isn’t this pencil lead smudgy? Why the THIRD DEGREE?

Then, in the unpredictable, delicious way thing work out so I can weave them together into a neat little story, we had a girls basketball tournament last week at Kurume High School. For two days the poor, sad teachers graded the junior high school student’s entrance exams, and while they were busy stamping things with red marks and passing them down the line to be triple-checked, the P.E. teacher, a first-year Japanese teacher and the quiet math teacher who sits next to me single-handedly organized a school-wide sports tournament. It happens every year, and it’s called class match, or, in English, “what we do with the students when we’re busy.”

The second year boys played soccer outside the window to the teacher’s room, so I could bob my head up from my desk to see outside when everyone cheered. It usually worked out so I heard the cheer, stood up, and had JUST missed the real action. The boys would be slump-shouldered, moving down the field, or giving each other elbow nudges in the ribs, the goalie kicking the dirt, getting ready to punt the ball. The Rash has played soccer since he was tall enough to clear the weed-chocked Montana fields, so I’ve seen my fair share of soccer games all across our stunning, barren state. Even on the second day of class match, when it rained (not enough to cancel class match, but enough to make things interesting) they ran around, spraying mud on each other when they slid to stop the ball. When they finally came in at lunchtime, and the P.E. teacher sent everyone home, they had mud streaked up and down their legs like wild animals after a brisk, gazelle-killing run.

Because I was recovering from a cold and I don’t really know a lot of the boys, I spent all of class match in the gym, watching the first and second year girls play basketball. I found the 1-1 homeroom, around lunchtime of the first day, and they told me they were winning. Well, a portion of them were. There are nearly forty girls in the 1-1 class, so they were broken down into four teams. I settled in among them to watch them play. Yuki, my old cleaning time pal, squats beside me and tries to explain. “We’re number one,” she says. When I got there the 1-1 winning team was having trouble sinking a basket.

Weaser, lithe sister that she is, is a pretty good basketball player. Well, better that yours truly who was once elbowed in the nose going up for a rebound and never again tried to “go for the ball.” Jazz, in her own way, wasn’t as terrible as me, the little shorty, and she played in both seventh AND eighth grade at a school where everyone had to be on the team to have a team. I like to watch basketball, especially Weaser basketball, because she has a knack for sports that got left out of my gene tree. Yet even I, the ball-afraid sister, could have joined the 1-1 winning team.

After lining up and bowing to each other, the girls lobbed wild shots from the half court line. Someone would go in for a layup, and throw the ball completely over the hoop where another girl caught it, and threw the same no-contact shot. Many, many shots from the free-throw line sailed right over the backboard–or right under it. The ball bounced into the crowd, near my head, then back into play, and off both walls. The scores were pathetically low, almost the same as the boys’ soccer scores. 4-2. 6-2. 2-0. They hardly dribbled, instead chucking the ball at each others’ stomachs, sort of like an indoor rugby game. There were no fouls, but all kinds of elbows in ribs, palms in faces, charges and hard ball slaps when people tried to take a shot. The winning 1-1 team had on red jerseys, and they played a white-jerseyed team. Because they never seemed to look where they were going, they crashed into the other team–and each other–with surprising frequency. Their jerseys a dancing version of the Japanese flag hung across the stage in the background.

There were no truly good players–the members of the basketball club had been commandeered as referees and were out of play–only the tall and the short. The tall players had a bit of advantage, and when they were on the court the 1-1 winning team occasionally picked up a rebound from a misshapen shot. The short players all got tangled under a net of arms, and when they did have a rebound smashed into their stomachs, it usually slipped through their arms and onto the ground where it rolled away from the mass of people, out of bounds. The winning 1-1 team made passes to no one that smacked into the hands of the white team. The ones who did catch the passes travelled all over the court, not even pretending to pivot, and then lobbed the ball high into the air, with what looked like only hope as a strategy.

It was a dangerous game, winning. Hitomi sprained her ankle and hobbled away from school on crutches. Cleaning time pal, Yuki, had two fingers taped together, and another girl had a wrapped wrist. I had to wonder if this was really the fault of the poor, abused game of basketball, or the fault of the wild players. Even sitting on the sidelines I felt like I needed a shield, or at least should sit a few rows back so the students blocked my breakable little body from all the basketballs flying about. Hannah, the British ALT, said this was her first time seeing basketball played and it surprised her as being quite exciting. It was exciting. The same excitement I feel when someone aims a canon at my head.

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And you thought the Superbowl commercials were good

In Superhero class we handed out their commercial assignments for English camp. They’ve got to come up with three or more uses for our strange, strange 100 yen purchases to convince us to buy them back. I brought a ukulele, dug out of our closet, left behind by a former ALT; a bike pump; and an Australian boomerang. Larin brought plastic things with hoses. To demonstrate what we required as far as comedy and ingenuity, I pretended to pump Larin up with the bike pump and he pretended to buckle at the knees and spew over the first row. Then I shot a line of compressed air into my eye to show how they could use it to remove offensive eye particles. As my eyes teared up from the glorious pain the groups came up one by one and selected their items.

Then, for the next hour, I watched one group use a neck massager as a headband. The X-Men picked a three-tiered blue fish net and I pretended to make it eat a boy’s head. The Supermen got a little antsy with their ukulele (they could only think of it as beetle-shaped) so I strapped the bright yellow case across my chest and pretended to pat a child’s head and sway while Larin played the same cord over and over.

I watched the Spidermen shoot tiny balls of paper out a plastic tube, and at the end of class they had a whole pile of nearly microscopic torn paper bits. Their leader took a half sheet of used paper, folded, folded, flipped, folded, and produced an origami box with old scratchy notes on the inside. They dumped their paper bullets inside, strapped a blank sheet over the top, and slipped it in their bags.

People who can make old paper bits into boxes and swans and flowers should have no problem figuring out what to do with what looks like an industrial ear cleaner.

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Secrets and Masks

“We aren’t supposed to be doing what we’re doing,” Crooked Teeth Sensei tells me as we’re walking back from class. “The third year students have a secret schedule.”

“Secret how?”

“No P.E. No history.”

“Don’t they need those classes to graduate?”

“In the book it says they’re taking them. Don’t tell anyone.”

Sure enough, when O Sensei gives me the third-year translated transcripts to check, there are final history and P.E. classes, things I know they’re not doing.

“All the high schools do this,” Gonzo Sensei says, “it’s how we keep our good reputation.”

The third year students are holed up with their stuffed birds on the third floor of the building next door, going over English grammar, difficult math, a bit of chemistry. All the “fun stuff”–the music and shodo and P.E. classes–have been sliced right out of their routine. The students write me essays about not knowing how to talk about Japanese culture. “We never learned this,” they say. But if you look at their transcript is says they did.

* * *

T-Rex Sensei beckons me into the little room next to the English classroom.

“Don’t tell anyone I’m here,” he says. He slides a sheaf of student essays across the table.

I un-cap my red pen and add a few prepositions. “Why?”

“They want me to do things for third year student exams. I don’t want to do them.”

“So you’re hiding out?”

“Exactly.”

* * *

We’re experiencing hay fever in February, a feat I never once thought possible. About a third of the teachers have cotton doctor’s masks over their nose and mouths to keep out the “pollen dust”. This pollen comes from the crops of non-native cedar trees the goverment has planted and means to harvest. Around ten percent of the population develops hay fever every spring from these trees. I think, en masse, our high school should take saws out to the forests, load up the trees, and pitch them off into the Pacific where they can float their way to Hawaii or create their own small island. The Sensei have watery, bulging eyes, and the mask covers the rest of their face, as though they’re hiding a ridiculously large blemish or a flesh-eating rash. Who knows what goes on under those masks. What kind of power does this pollen really have?

* * *

The 1-1 students hold up pieces of paper for each other to read. We’re playing a truth/lie game where they must ask each other questions, and guess each others’ lies. One large, bulky girl who will play “the thing” in her superhero’s story of the Fantastic Four, writes:

I have a boyfriend. /I am dangerous.

Which is the lie?

* * *

Then there’s Peaquah, popping excedrin tension headache like vitamins. My back is pinching down into a tighter and tighter “S”, and the kerosene from the heaters makes my head feel wavery on the inside and on the outside hard as tin. I have a secret little drawer for my bright red pills, and an unaturally cranky attitude before I’ve taken one.

None of that is as bad as my biggest secret of all: I have no work and four hours to kill before I can jet out of here. My real reason for writing everyone’s secrets is that at least it makes me look busy.

 

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February’s superheros

T-Rex Sensei’s third-year class has dwindled to five students. The bulk of the class is off taking Fukuoka University’s entrance exams. All afternoon I watch the students trickle back, their Kurume High School bags tucked in their elbows, the sun in their eyes. They’re exhausted.

They’re all exhausted. The most common response to “how are you?” is no longer “I’m fine”, but the disappointing “I’m tired” and if they had the vocabulary it’d be “I’m exhausted” “I’m worked to the bone” “I could drop dead right now”. “Why are you tired Kohei? Hitomi? Yuki?” I ask. No one knows.

Kohei puts his head on his desk in Superhero Class. We’re doing a multi-week prep for English camp–or Superhero camp–which is coming up in March and twice a week all we do is answer questions about the superheros they’re writing skits about. Can superman fly? Is Batman really a bat? What does “evil” really mean? There are only three boys in 1-1, and Red Hammer Sensei insisted they be separated. “You’re the only boy,” I say to Kohei, “you must be strong against the girls.” I flex my bicep in his face. He gives me half a smile over his crooked teeth. I ruffle his hair. It feels like wire bristles covered in frost.

Hitomi’s group, writing about Superman, doodle on their notebook pages. “Where were you yesterday?” I ask Hitomi.

“Absent,” she says.

“Yes,” I say, “I know. Why?”

She shrugs one shoulder. “No reason.”

Her group members whip around. “Did you study?” they ask in Japanese. “Did you? Did you? Didja?”

She gives a graceful little dip of her head.

“No, really?” they say. “You can tell us.”

Hitomi gives me a big smile. “I sleep in,” she says, “a lot.” I pat her on the back.

I’m feeling the winter drain, too. I pass my teachers in the hall between the teacher’s room and the principal’s office, the teacher’s room and the bathroom, the teacher’s room and the front door. “It’s cold,” they say, and I nod. “Yes, it is.” The girls wear regulation black tights under their uniforms, but they’re thin enough to see goosebumps. On my way to school I pass kindergarteners hobbling through the snow in the navy shorts of their uniform. I wear four or five shirts to school, enough so the girls in an oral communication class reach out to pat my belly. “Baby?” they say, “Congratulations?” The temperature outside is the same as it is inside, is the same as the running water in the school and our apartment and the train station. The bathroom water that, in the summer, felt refreshing, now tries to frostbite my fingers.

Our gym in covered in a shroud, undergoing major cosmetic surgery, so the all gym class are held on the grounds outside. Right next to the window in the teacher’s room I see students doing jumping jacks while snowflakes tickle the branches of the palm trees out front. Their breath, heavy from running laps, fogs up our windows. In the beginning of January we have our opening ceremony outside, because no one is allowed to peak under the huge black dropcloth over the gym, and the girls squatted on the ground, trying to scratch their way into it like chickens, their skirts like navy feathers. One girl, already prone to fainting from what the teachers describe as a “psychological condition” and “blood pressure gone wrong” collapsed in the middle of her row, and the students on either side rippled out of the way, tucking their skirts between their knees, between their calves and thighs. These are not fainting times.

Another ALT, originally from cold, snowy Winsconsin, gets frostbite on her toes each winter in Japan. They’re itchy, red, swollen. She can’t feel them half the time. I have phantom pains in my own toes. Is that scab a frostbite pustule? Should I wear two pairs of socks or three?

All the lady administrators wear arm warmers. It’s patterned cotton with elastic at the elbow and wrist so the fabric billows out like water wings. In the mornings I catch The Big Kahuna squatting by our robotic, giant space heater. He has his hands out as if to warm them on a fire.

I find myself needing more and more caffeine. We keep the curtains drawn in the apartment to keep the cold air from sneaking in the window cracks, and it creates a timeless feel. Is it 3am or 6pm? Dinner or breakfast? We’ve more than tripled our gas bill in the last two months because we fill up the old, blue tub twice a day. My eyes look redder and baggier each morning. But where my eyelids try to pry themselves away from my weak, tired eyes, bunching underneath with bags big enough for a weekend trip, my students’ crinkle and crumple to keep their tired secrets. Theirs get a pinched, tight look. The skin underneath their eyes takes on a yellow cast, like a slight bruise, like someone has pressed a thumbprint into their skin, but other than that, they look chipper. Three of the girls have new haircuts. They’re trying to cheer themselves up. I know because I got one last weekend too.

In the midst of all this shivering and saying “brrrrrr” to each other we talk about their superheros and the amazing things they can do. “This guy can light himself on fire. Isn’t that cool?” I say and the group sort of looks off into the distance wistfully. We look at each other a little hungrily, like why can’t one of us burst into flame for just a second? Just long enough to warm our fingers and toes a little bit or to heat up a gallon of water to wash our hands. How selfish do you have to be? Then we realize that we need a better power, one with more oomph. And we don’t need someone who can stretch or put us to sleep or knock down walls. We don’t need Caffeine Chap or Firey Franny or Edward Examtastic.

We just need a superhero who can change the weather.

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