The Man Festival: A Hoodlum Holiday. Tis The Season For Underage Drinking

I have no idea who any of my students are today. I don’t know their names. I can’t see their faces. I can’t make eye contact with them to try to telepathically communicate to them that “English is fun!” All that greets me when I enter the classroom are the tops of their heads. Spikey black hair is all I get to look at. The boys are sprawled out over their desks. Their defunct arms hang languidly over the sides. Their faces are flattened against their closed notebooks, which act as towels collecting little puddles of drool. Some are clearly unconscious. Some are clearly hung over. A couple of more ambitious students attempt to try to keep their heads up, but their blood-shot eyes roll back in their heads and their necks give out on them as they fall forwards in a messy heap.

It’s the day after the Niihama Taiko MAN FESTIVAL at the local hoodlum school. Some boys have simply stayed home. But a good majority of them have been told to go to school. And so they come—their pants halfway down their asses, their gold buttons on their uniform jackets falling off or undone, their notebooks looking like something recovered from an earthquake disaster. There are only two things that are pristine and perfect about them: their hair that has been gelled to perfection so that it sweeps across the brow at the perfect becoming angle, and their eyebrows which are plucked and arched neatly.

The Taiko MAN FESTIVAL is a crapulent affair that all these boys look forward to. It is the one time a year they can join together with other brawny men with groomed eyebrows, heave a two ton float made of wood, metal, cloth and decorated with ferocious golden dragons over their heads and walk down the streets of Niihama blowing whistles, beating drums and generally creating a row, whilst awed viewers follow in their wake or cheer them on from the sidelines. However, as the festival is renowned for being somewhat dangerous, students are forbidden from carrying the floats. This does nothing to dissuade these students. I asked several of the more tired looking ones if they carried the massive thing, to which they responded: “FUCK YEAH!” And then upon seeing my look of surprise added, “But yeah, that’s a secret.”

In between classes a teacher confides to me: “Several students came in late yesterday with bandaged hands. I asked them what happened and they told me, ‘bike accident.’ It looked like they had been carrying the taiko-dais!” What this astute teacher failed to realize was that maybe, just maybe, the students were telling the truth. It was from a bike accident. A bike accident after they carried the taiko-dai, got completely sloshed and then fell off their bike in a drunken stupor attempting to ride home.

The boys are still in the festival spirit, or perhaps still drunk. By afternoon a few have woken up a bit. As one teacher attempts to hand back their midterm exams the boys become antsy. As their classmates are called up to receive their scores: 9 points out of 100, 15 out of a hundred, 23 out of a hundred, other students whip out their contraband cell phones and the teacher suddenly becomes the makeshift taiko-dai. As the students intermittently gasp in awe and roar in loud, guffawious laughter, several boys climb behind the teacher snapping photos of his oleaginous head or invade all personal space to capture a macro-shot to show to all their friends later. The teacher is unbelievably patient as he sits calmly on his stool, allowing the students to swarm around him like hyenas on a wildebeest.

“How did you do?” I ask a boy who is standing towards the front with his test paper in hand. He nods and waves me off. “No. How… did… you… do? Your test.” I point to his paper and he shows me. Fifty-five. Not too bad. I ask him if he went to the festival yesterday. “OF COURSE!” he responds. He then surreptitiously takes out his cell phone and starts paging through photos of his float. Then he looks at his phone, looks at me and smiles. He looks over to his friends, turns back to me to give me a knowing How YOU Doing grin. And before I know it, he has sidled up next to me and captured both our souls on his cell phone. He then asks me if I plan on going to the festival again tonight as the event runs for three days. “Maybe,” I say. He lickerishly grins again at me, looks me up and down and advises me on where to go.

“I also have to hand back their tests today,” another teacher tells me. She shows me the scores on the exams, ranging from 9 to 95 out of 102. Probability did not smile down upon most of these students. The 95 leaves me stunned. Most answers are marked with a circle, Japan’s equivalent of a western check mark. And a “good job!” rallies the student on from the corner.

“Wow. Ninety-five! That’s fantastic!”

“Yes. He is the best in the class. He used to love English,” she says rather sadly.

“Used to?”

“The other boys in the class are all very bad students. All very loud. I don’t think he likes English as much as he did,” she says. “His eyes used to sparkle in class. But now, they are dead.”

She laughs. I cry.

Unwittingly I spend the rest of the class period trying to find the poor boy who once loved English with the “dead eyes.” A challenging feat since ninety-five percent of the class has been out heaving taiko floats over their heads, painting the town red and getting illegally sauced.

sin city likeness

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Published:
10.20.07 / 9am
Category:
classroom antics, amusing incidents, what i call life, culture