A Shadow on the Field

The junior high school where I work is recovering from a traumatic event yesterday morning. I approached the school at around 8:05am from the south side, to enter by walking across the great sports field. It was crowded on Thursday with students practicing for next week's Sports Festival in their P.E. uniforms. I entered the little foyer in the back of the building and put my umbrella in the stand. I was saying good morning to some teachers and was about to take my shoes off when I noticed another teacher rushing inside and then back out again. I looked out to see a group of teachers huddled in a tight group with curious students clustered in a wider circle of groups. Then I perceived a child on the ground in the center of the teacher group, on his back, his arms and legs stretched out limp. A teacher rushed past me to grab the first aid kit and go back outside.

Some teachers began herding the other students away and the field was soon cleared but, it being early morning before homeroom, there was still a steady stream of students coming in through the back gate. Some of them looked curiously at the group of teachers. I tried to distract some students by giving them the normal, cheerful greetings in English. Part of my job is to chat with students in English outside of class. But I knew that many students were inevitably going to be perfectly conscious of what was transpiring and there was very little I could say to them in any language.

A few other teachers diverted the stream of students to entering on the western side of the school. One of the younger English teachers was standing outside the foyer, watching what was transpiring and I asked him what was happening. "The boy's heart has stopped," he told me. "He is fighting."

I could see they were doing CPR on the student and a stretcher had been brought out though it wasn't used. One of the teachers was screaming, "Ganbatte!", a word that's usually translated as "good luck" but the "te" at the end makes it a sort of command. So it's sort of like saying, "Work hard to a good result."

Ambulances finally arrived and the boy went to the hospital without regaining consciousness. I don't know if he regained consciousness at the hospital. The last I heard he is being kept unconscious but an operation on his heart had been a success. The teacher who'd first sounded the alarm about the student is one I talk to and work with frequently and she told me the boy had been running two hundred meters and wearing a mask. There've been reports of students suffering health problems because they exercised wearing masks, some of them even dying, so normally the students remove their masks while exercising. Some of them have been wearing their masks lately, though. I'm not sure if it's out of habit or out of concern for the recent uptick of Covid cases.

The boy is a second year student, making him thirteen or fourteen years old. He's also a baseball player. The kids on the baseball team are so easy-going and courteous. They wear full uniforms when they practice and when I greet them they always tip their hats to me in reply. This particular boy is a popular and good-natured fellow.

There are three years of students in the school. First year students (twelve or thirteen years old) have their classrooms on the top floor, second years have theirs on the third floor, and third years (fourteen and fifteen year olds) have theirs on the first and second floors. It was strange how blissfully unaffected or unaware the third and first year students seemed while the atmosphere on the third floor was palpably confused and somber within the hours after the incident. Kids started to behave a little more like normal once news came that the boy was alive and stable.

I talked to kids who wanted to talk. Some were in no mood to bother with English and I could hardly blame them. I stood with one of my favourite students from the art club while she cried, even though she barely knew the boy. There were plenty of teachers shedding tears, too, especially the boy's homeroom teacher. This was followed by a general lack of motivation to go about the normal business of the day, which affected me too. Things were a little more normal to-day, though school ended an hour earlier than it was scheduled to and the second year students went home instead of working on their flags for the Sports Festival or doing their normal club activities. We're all hoping for good news on Monday.