Superfluous Thermal Underwear Superfluous Teachers

Suddenly it becomes no longer necessary to wear two pairs of pants. My Little Orphan Annie gloves lie forlornly in the corner and the once highly coveted Eskimo garb is lumbering ever so slowly towards the closet to await next winter when it can once again go seal and whale poaching. The plum blossoms begin to fade and cherry blossom buds take their place waiting for their twenty seconds of fame before they shrivel up, die and go into bear-like hibernation for another eleven months. Unfortunately, beauty is a fleeting and elusive thing.

Just as the thermal underwear gets tossed away, so do some teachers. Japan has a curious system of rotating teachers. Every year a few get shuffled around to various other schools for reasons that aren’t quite clear to me. Their lives at times are completely uprooted, their friends left behind, their commuting time may double or triple, or they may be banished to an island in the middle of the Seto Inland Sea populated by leper students where no one ever deigns to go. Perhaps it is to spread out the joy of various cities. Perhaps it is so that the teachers can experience different school atmospheres and spread their knowledge to kids outside of just one town. But given the fact that most of the schools, when boiled down, appear to do exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time throughout most of Japan, it could all just be a giant plot to subtly irk the public servants.

One of my English teachers is leaving – a part time teacher I taught with twice a week. Sadly, I don’t know much about him besides that he is passionate about both skiing and ballroom dancing; two activities which fall on two completely different sides in the spectrum of coolness. In order to celebrate his departure and thank him for his hard work the English department decides to go out for lunch. I pile into my JTE’s car with two other JTEs and we head towards the restaurant.

“Will Leaving-Sensei be meeting us there?” I enquire.

“Maybe.”

I chortle. A leaving luncheon to send off a teacher with a hearty bon voyage and there’s only a glimmer of a possibility that he’ll even make an appearance. Or, this is the Japanese way of avoiding any sort of certainty or forwardness in a conversation. I find I do this too these days. My sentences become littered with “maaaybes” working as suffixes and prefixes of the main clauses. My waitresses constantly wonder if I REALLY want that second cup of coffee, my friends are skeptical if I’ll ACTUALLY show up to their party that weekend whilst cursing me for my indecisiveness, and my parents ponder if I miss them but AT ALL.
“Maybe. I certainly believe so. Maybe.”
“ARE YOU JUST SAYING THAT?”
“…Maybe.”

The innocuous mundane questions continue:

“So, have you been to this restaurant before? Is it good?”

“It’s… ordinary.”

Despite this stellar recommendation it’s nice to be escaping the now fairly empty staff room for at least a bit of time.

We arrive and Leaving-Sensei is already there waiting to collect his last free meal. The last remaining JTE shows up and we all sit down to eat. They all speak decent enough English. It is erudite and fluent compared to my defective, deplorable Japanese, however it suddenly feels as though I am a ten-year-old child playing at life, pretending to be a teacher, faking having a job and yet somehow getting paid to do so. I sit there in the middle of five Japanese men, looking around and understanding every 375th word they utter as it tends to be the noncommittal word and my old friend “maybe.” There is plentiful nodding and smiling but underneath the veneer of understanding I cannot help but feel even younger and more juvenile.

That feeling is only exacerbated when the meal finishes and their coffee and tea comes accompanied by a hugely comical wine glass full of juice for me. It is brighter, sunnier and more artificial looking than Sunkist orange soda back home. One of my JTEs looks at me amusedly from across the table. I spend the rest of the meal enjoying my juice, peering out with wide brown eyes over the massive rim of my Brobdignagian wine glass o’ juice as the grownups discuss, well, it could have been anything- primates, poetry written by dwarves, who knows.

Succinct Speeches For The Win!!!11

Ceremonies encircle all aspects of life in Japan. Therefore in order to make the teachers’ departure more official and more, well, Japanesey, a ceremony takes place every year where the teachers are recognized for their contributions to the school – no matter how long or how short. The gym is again a buzz of movement- only this time a crowd of auburn colored heads stands out from the crowd. The graduates have returned to say goodbye, and in a triumphant proclamation of their individuality and hipness the have all bleached their hair. I almost don’t recognize half of them as they suddenly have aged 6-8 years and their faces are engulfed in makeup – their skin suddenly several shades lighter and their eyes somehow widened by black eye makeup.

About thirteen teachers are leaving this year. Each teacher stands and the principal reads a list of their achievements and contributions. It’s like reading the cliff’s notes version of their personal CVs. Afterwards each teacher stands, completes the appropriate complex tango routine of bowing and then proceeds to the podium where he/she addresses the students and faculty one last time.

One young agriculture teacher gets up to make a speech. While his English is lacking (we’ve only had several encounters, one being where he gawked at me, pointed at the clock and uttered, “Time! TIME!” To which I nodded and agreed that it indeed was conveying the time), his Japanese is apparently quite eloquent. I understand bits here and there- and it sounds (to the girl-who-speaks-fetal-Japanese) like a well-crafted speech- with amusing anecdotes about his progression from elementary school eating butter-rolls (or, in Japanese, ba-ta-ro-ru), to university studying agriculture where he learned where said butter-rolls came from and the economy involved in selling them, and to his years teaching. He ends his speech and one JTE jumps to his feet clapping, only to realize to his grim embarrassment that the speeches sadly aren’t over. He falls back into robot mode, smiles sheepishly and like everyone else falls into a uniform mute bow to acknowledge the completed speech.

My personal favorite speech however is made by a seemingly rather shy, quiet, round, little math teacher with hair like a parrot who has only taught here for a year. His speech is the last one and by far the best. His walk to the podium takes longer than his entire speech:

“Thanks for one year” he says, and once again sits down.

Awesome. I understand every word out of his mouth. Instead of dragging out the mandatory ceremony for more than is necessary, he makes it brief, sweet and to the point. You will be missed, my dear, sweet friend.

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Published:
4.2.07 / 6pm
Category:
amusing incidents, what i call life, culture