Stranger With Candy:my second first day of school

I vaguely remember my first day in my American high school, but I can rest assured that I will

definitely recall my second first day at high school… in Japan.

I walked to school once again since I wasn’t feeling the bike. I didn’t want to arrive in a bloody mess. I was supposed to be here at 8:20AM and dutifully arrived a good fifteen minutes early.

Welcome to Niihama Minami High School.

Every morning there is an ‘Office Meeting’ in which all the teachers congregate in the meeting room and no doubt spew forth all sorts of brilliant rays of wisdom, none of which I will ever be able to understand. Actually I was able to comprehend bits and pieces here and there but basically it boils down to a few ground rules: 1. Stand when everyone else stands. And 2. Bow when everyone else bows. 3. Nod and smile agreeably even if during the meeting they had discussed the ten best possible ways to kill and eat puppies, kittens and baby koalas. Then go back to enjoying whatever morning breakfast drink you might have bought at one of the numerous vending machines en route to the school in the morning.

I had to do a brief introduction of myself which seemed rather absurd to me given the fact that the principal had JUST recited all my basic 411 and all I was doing was repeating it in shit-poor Japanese. But did it I did probably looking like the sullen, un-genki, somewhat flustered New Yorker that I am.

Hida sensei took me on a brief tour of some parts of the school. It’s not a bad looking school. The rooms are quite clean, large, spacey and the room that I will be doing most of my teaching in is hooked up with tape players at every desk, large over-head projectors and a nice library full of movies suitable (in my opinion) for elementary school kids. I managed to get Hida sensei (an English teacher who I will probably be teaching about one lesson a week with) to give me a seating plan which he dutifully wrote out in furigana/romanji/English for me. This man has been driving me around for the past 2 days doing all sorts of crap and being the horrible person I am, I had completely forgotten his name. Thank god for floor plans.

Yesterday was spent getting my keitai (cellphone), internet and foreigner card in the works. We also did a bit of shopping at the local mall which is HUGE, bright, glorious and full of all kinds of random crap I foresee myself purchasing, but forever away from me. I probably will never be able to find it again. And if I do, it’s going to be some miracle that I wasn’t brutally thrown from my bike and killed by a large moving vehicle manned by some little old Japanese woman grinning with yellow teeth coming down the street. Nothing about that day was easy. It involved huge amount of waiting and multiple trips to each of the stores. During the course of the day we visited the City Office THREE times, the Keitai store twice and the bank a whopping three times as well. Had this been back home I probably would have thrown up my hands after the first or second rejection and said “meh. We’ll try again next week. Good try, sport.” But no, Hida sensei was more than willing to waste his gas and listen to that Prince CD which has been on replay the past 3 days in his car. Prince can call me “darlin’ Nikki” all he wants, but I don’t think I will EVER be a fan.

From the view in the teacher’s room I can see the Love Princess’s beautiful mountains. There are some kids here for summer school and I can hear them playing music (badly) in the music room. I had Hida sensei take me to the music room and was greeted with the sight of an upright Yamaha as well as a HUGE grand piano in the main room which was pretty awesome.

Some other note: My keitai is NOT, in fact, as small as I was hoping it would be. Derek Zoolander would scoff at it and assure me that I was not REALLY in Japan at all. It’s about the same size as my American phone, but antenna-less. It has ALL sorts of various functions, I’m sure, however since I can’t understand a damn thing on it I probably will never be able to implement its laser shooting function or built in teletransporter. Hell, I think I have voicemail on it and can’t even figure out how to get to it. Sigh. My only comfort is that I asked a teacher in my office (Murakami sensei – teacher of history – these little name droppings are more to help me than you – remembering everyones’ name is a pain) to help me send an email on my keitai and he couldn’t figure it out either and he speaks the damn language. He has been very kind thus far telling me to ask him if I have any questions at all. I have to say, if I didn’t speak any Japanese whatsoever, as many JETs do, I don’t know how I’d survive. Even just the little vocabulary and simple sentence constructions that I know are doing absolute wonders.

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Published:
8.4.06 / 5pm
Category:
classroom antics, what i call life