When I chat with the Japanese junior high school students I work with, I often like to ask about their dreams. Most of the time, they can't remember any dreams but yesterday a girl told me she dreamed of eating great quantities of eclairs. This particular student is always fun to talk to because comes off as genuine as an old comic strip character. I asked if she had a favourite pastry shop in town (there are many in Japan) but she said she can't shop at them because she's allergic to eggs. No wonder she was dreaming of eclairs.
Here are some of my recent doodles from the art club. As you can see, I've been in the mood to draw Nesuko lately. It's kind of nice living in a country where the comic industry isn't dead.
X Sonnet #1816
A line of hams await the casting brunch.
A glaze of ink adorns the creamy script.
Together, crews assemble fast a lunch.
The foam of lonesome black was full and tipped.
A nightly glow distorts the damaged main.
Armadas drift abeam of scuttled hulks.
Gelat'nous moons would melt to quickly wane.
The slinker cracks a jar then slyly skulks.
The blinking bat forgets to sleep in June.
As timing's right for flight, the sirens wake.
Aloft on leather wings, the creature loomed.
Presented late, the feature pushed a take.
As dusty sets amass a bloody dream,
The crew devoured steamy pastry cream.
My Christmas tree this year. To-day's feeling fairly Christmasy, too; it's been snowing for the past couple hours. Proper cold came late this year. I said it'd come a few weeks ago but that one day turned out to be a fluke. It's only this week I've been wearing my heavy Inverness coat and long underwear.
Yesterday was my last day at my current school and it was also the day the school's English club had a Christmas party. I was especially sad to say goodbye to them as most of them are second year students and will therefore be third year students, and no longer participating in club activities, if I go back next year at the same time. They read from "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" and I showed them A Charlie Brown Christmas, which one student particularly seemed to like. The same student student brought balloons and had come up with a balloon volleyball game which we played. The kids really enjoyed it and I was happy to see some of the quieter ones coming out of their shells.
On Monday, we played our last Dungeons and Dragons game, from the original Dragonlance module I started them on last year. They voyaged to the heart of Xak Tsaroth, which I copied onto large sheets of graph paper, and faced the black dragon Khisanth, for which I'd made a little origami dragon. It was a hard battle, but they prevailed.
I also gave them candy canes I'd gotten on Amazon, just like last year. I remember last year it was so cold and snowy that I slipped on the ice outside my door, breaking some of the candy canes. No broken candy canes this year, so that's something.
X Sonnet #1800
Deceptive colours slice the temple lime.
With thoughts of horses, sleep at night descends.
A distant word reduces thought to time.
On shaky ropes, the fate of tongues depends.
A frigid castle broke the ice for kings.
No naming code could talk to me of words.
The eyes denied the worth of golden rings.
Dissolving shops amassed a dozen herds.
Balloons rebound from busy fingertips.
A table net preserves the space of play.
A fearful sky is full of watchful ships.
Conceptions ever dampen down the day.
Beyond the grasp of tortured brains it shines.
Escape was hid on garbage destined rinds.
Yesterday was my last day at one of the schools I work at, though I'll be going back to this particular school in January. I've been working at this school since 2020 so I've formed a real attachment to it. I said goodbye to the art club and the colour guard, the two clubs I hang out with. I watched the colour guard practice a new dance until 7pm. It's great seeing how committed they are and how rigorously they repeated the same dance moves in the increasingly humid weather.
In the art club, I drew pictures for some students. Here are a few doodles I've accumulated this year, some things I've drawn in the art club:
A dragon.
I was doodling the Fourth Doctor on the right and explaining how to draw a cat to a new student on the left. I told her to study cat skeletons.
I'm afraid I blathered on about John Milton and my take on his daughter, Deborah, for my webcomic.
I was trying to find a way to explain how "view" is used as a noun in English. The text book, written by an esteemed committee of Japanese professors, gets it wrong, as it does many things. Some of the mistakes in the books are hilarious. My favourite is a page from the second year text book in which the students are taught sentences for offering assistance to tourists. One sentence they're encouraged to use is "What's the matter with you?" I found a supercut on YouTube of Robert De Niro using the phrase to explain why it's a very rude, unwise thing for students to say to tourists. For the rare occasion when a Japanese English teacher accepts my authority on a subject over a text book. I'm routinely reminded why Japan has the worst English education in Asia. It's not so funny when you remember how students suffer for it.
Somehow I ended up watching 1995's Clueless last night. I don't think I'd seen it all the way through since it came out though I must have seen bits and pieces whenever my sister watched it. It's certainly a relic of a bygone era, isn't it? Could you make a movie about a dumb rich blonde girl to-day? I mean, one who's supposed to be sympathetic? Maybe there are examples among movies and TV series I haven't seen.
I find myself watching it through two lenses--a nostalgic lens, for '90s America and my youth, and an English teacher in Japan lens. Japanese teachers have asked me more than once, "What's school like in the US?" Usually I recommend The Breakfast Club or Pretty in Pink. I suppose Clueless and Mean Girls should be on the list, too. Clueless might be perfect to show kids in Japan because Cher (Alicia Silverstone) is so positive, and positivity is a message that's vigorously pressed on students.
Wikipedia quotes writer/director Amy Heckerling as saying,
"The most successful character in anything I'd ever done was Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times. People think that's because he was stoned and a surfer. But that's not it. It's because he's positive. So I thought, 'I'm going to write a character who's positive and happy.' And that was Cher."
Plus, Cher's a virgin, which is valued much more highly in Japan than in the US. Cher and her friends are all wealthy but no-one in the movie mentions it, there are no class issues present, which would also make it ideal. Two of the American movies that have clearly gone through committees to be officially endorsed at schools I've worked at, Wonder and Back to the Future, both show characters living comfortably and economic disparity is never mentioned (so maybe I shouldn't be recommending Pretty In Pink). The only real problem with Clueless is that it features two characters who smoke pot. Drugs are talked about casually and sometimes approvingly in the movie. Oh, well.
Anyway. I enjoyed Clueless. The moment at the climax when Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd are staring at each other is so sweet and really made me want to watch more romantic films. Why do those two work? All of the moments meant to prove that Cher isn't so dumb are very circumstantial and ultimately meaningless, like when she knows the Hamlet quote better than the supposedly smart girl. There's no real indication that Cher is as interested as Josh is in exploring concepts. She just likes being nice. She can be manipulative but only to please her father and her friends. The fact that her manipulations are transparent and sometimes clumsy adds to her charm. She and Josh adore each other, each kind of pities the other, which would be a red flag if Josh bothered consulting Nietzsche on the subject.
If you zoom in on that book, you can see the name "Friedrich Nietzsche" is taped onto the back. Heckerling really wanted you to know who Josh was reading. Nietzsche considered pity a demeaning and ultimately harmful thing, for both the one who pities and the one who is pitied.
Josh pities Cher because she's dumb and Cher pities Josh because he's unfashionable. Is that good enough? I can't help thinking about . . .
You see that? You can't kill Woody Allen, he's in our heads forever . . .
Clueless is available on Paramount.
Twitter Sonnet #1680
With icing lost behind the crash we ate.
With frozen food we made a home at large.
And wandered out across the tundra late.
We saw the gathered flakes of blizzard charge.
Confusion clouds the rink before the freeze.
Above the falling skate a beauty cries.
A frosted glass contains a thousand seas.
Preserved in glacier ice, her lonesome sighs.
Combining cherry red with fuchsia wins.
But phantom dates revolve the living room.
To make the grade, she seeks the aid of sins.
Effective colours break the party tomb.
Mistakes allowed the lace to top dessert.
And now the tea and coffee might invert.
Yesterday was a long, bittersweet experience. It was graduation day here in Japan and I watched students graduate from junior high school whom I met in their first year when I came to Japan in 2020. Junior high school is three years in Japan, and it's the last period of compulsory education. So it's regarded as much more important here than in the US. I recently saw some video from my own junior high school graduation back in 1993.
I'm the blonde in the middle with glasses. To my left is my friend Tim. Everyone in the video looks restless and bored, a far cry from the formal series of bows and singing and speeches I witnessed yesterday.
After the ceremony, the teachers and staff make the "flower road" in the field outside, lining up in two rows for the departing students to walk through. Then everyone mills around, taking pictures and making final farewells before the students finally exit, officially no longer junior high school students. I spoke to as many students as I could. Some of them I'm really going to miss and am bitterly sorry I'll never be able to see again. I work at several schools but they all hold their graduation ceremonies on the same day, so I can only go to one. I went to the school at which I'd spent the most time but that still left out a lot of students I dearly wished I could have seen.
After lunch, I went to the mall and was delighted to see and talk to many students from many schools. Many of the girls were wearing tiaras and sashes. One girl, a kick boxing champion, had done her hair and nails to perfection, her nails having little silver flowers glued to them. I saw some students I hadn't seen since 2021, whose school I wasn't assigned to last year. That was an unexpected treat.
Even after all that, there were still several students I was disappointed not to see. In previous years, some of them flagged me down later throughout the year at train stations. Getting closure seems to be very important to people here. I can only hope I will eventually see some of these students. In particular, there were two I worked with after school, teaching them how to read Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury. I sure I hope I see them eventually. But there's every possibility I never will.
Yesterday I went to see a performance by the brass band and colour guard from one of the schools I work at. This show was the culmination of months of preparation and practice and they were great.
Part of my job is to walk around the school and visit the clubs to engage students in English conversation. In my first year, I spent almost all my time with the art club but I also made one or two visits to other clubs. I'm not really interested in sports, which is kind of a sore spot because sports are really important in Japan. Especially baseball, which, I can say without exaggeration, is like a religion here. But on days when the art club doesn't meet, I had to visit other clubs and I found myself making repeat visits to the more creatively inclined clubs like the brass band and the colour guard. And then it got so I spent half the week with the art club and half the week with the colour guard.
One of the other English teachers is in charge of the colour guard so it gives me an opportunity to talk to her. But the students themselves are also remarkable. All the colour guard members are girls at this school. They and the girls in art club remind me that not all Japanese women are incredibly uptight. The colour guard girls are always fun to talk to. They like horror movies and dance music. I saw one of them last year posing in the hallway like Madonna in her "Vogue" video. When I asked if she liked Madonna I found out she'd never heard of her. I gave her a note to check out "Vogue" on YouTube--I often recommend English music, movies, and books to students. In this case, her wide eyes and words of thanks the next day told me I'd struck gold. I like to think of myself as a media matchmaker sometimes and it makes me happy when I can pair the right person with the right music or movie.
This girl graduated earlier this year and was serving as an usher for yesterday's show. Watching the students on stage, many of whom were getting ready to move on, it occurred to me I was probably witnessing, for many of them, the single greatest moment of their lives, at least in terms of self-fulfillment. When I watch the colour guard practice, a former student who works at a bakery comes by to help train them. Not that there's anything wrong with working at a bakery, and she shows us items from the latest menu with pride. The bakeries around here are fantastic--despite what you may have heard, the Japanese aren't all about rice. But clearly her centre of pride is associated with the colour guard.
After the performance yesterday, I hung around outside the nearby department store to give any students who wanted it the opportunity to talk to me. A couple girls walked up and one of them showed me a short piece of footage on her phone of a boy playing snare drum. He was wearing a hoodie with the hood covering his face--all of the drummers were for a performance of a Yoasabi song. In the footage, he stopped and pulled back the hood and looked at the audience dramatically. He was the girl's boyfriend. She emphatically said, "He's cool. I love him."
I watched the first episode of the new Stranger Things season last night but I want to avoid making a full review until I've watched through all the new episodes that were put on Netflix. But it was a very strong season premiere and I found myself comparing it to Obi-Wan Kenobi, which it easily outshines. It's funny how a show that deliberately uses stock characters from the 1980s manages to make more complex and interesting characters than most shows.
I couldn't help being struck by two aspects of the show, though, that echo current issues--violence in high schools and a threat posed by Russia. I think the season was more or less in the can before Russia invaded Ukraine though, of course, violence in American schools has become an all too common occurrence. On Friday, a fellow teacher at the Japanese junior high school where I work asked me about the recent mass shooting in Texas. She told me a lot of people in Japan are talking about it. I was a little surprised and admitted that, since it has become so sadly common in the U.S., I hadn't actually paid much attention to the story.
Generally, feelings about the U.S. seem to be positive among the people I meet in Japan but quite a few regard Americans with horror and disgust. Sometimes I overhear things from people who assume my Japanese isn't as good as it is. I remember once overhearing someone at one school trying to mollify a teacher regarding my presence by reminding her that the U.S. is also responsible for Microsoft and Google, companies with a ubiquitous presence in Japan. Then, of course, there's Disney, Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and various other companies and brands. I wonder if it's really reassuring. Is it a reminder that America is responsible for good things or just awareness that Japan has irrevocably bitten of the same fruit so they better hope American culture isn't inherently corrosive?
I have talked to students with parents who are fearful about their children being exposed to too much negativity. I was reminded of this in the scenes featuring Dungeons & Dragons on Stranger Things and references to the 1980s' "Satanic Panic". Yet I can't remember the last time I saw the level of ultraviolence I saw on the latest season of Kimetsu no Yaiba, which seems to be popular with people of all ages.
I'm long past having any qualms about making or viewing art with dark themes or a willingness to explore the worst impulses of the human heart. But I'm constantly confronted by the debate, both from the U.S. and Japan. I can only hope that people aren't diverted from the contemplation of human nature I think is truly necessary in art for all sorts of reasons, the understanding of real violence being one of them.
This was the sunset yesterday as I left the junior high school. I'd stayed late to watch the baseball team practice. They stayed practicing long after I left. They really are like monks. When I walked onto the field, every single one of the fifty or so players stopped, took off his or her hat, and bowed. They did that every time a teacher walked onto the field.
I say "his or her" because there are three girls on the team. At other schools, usually there are one or two girls. They wear the same full uniform as the boys every time they practice. The only difference I see is that the girls don't shave their heads.
Their enthusiasm for the sport is amazing. But plenty of them like to joke and horse around. Two of the strongest hitters set up near my seat and showed off their skills. One of them tossed balls to the other who slammed each one into the net or occasionally well over the top of the high fence into the distant rice field. The strength in their hits was palpable. One of them pointed at the other, grinning, and said, "Ohtani-san."
Twitter Sonnet1571
A basic smile cinched the face to full.
And here expression meets a human hue.
With feathers fluffed a love's horizons pool.
A fervent letter starts and ends with Q.
A fire dream was dancing by her head.
A snarling glass was broken years before.
Departed kings remain as restless dead.
The sand was grey along the violent shore.
Another shade of red entangled stairs.
To rap the door a bell constructs a ring.
The quiet pond contained reflected bears.
From early dawn the birds refused to sing.
The air was blurred for lingered petal pink.
Kinetic games displayed the motion link.
Yesterday was pretty amazing. It was my last day at one of the schools I work at, possibly my last day ever since the company that employs me hasn't told me where I'm going next. So I felt pretty heavy-hearted in the morning. It's amazing how much this school has come to feel like home after two years. But one reason I love it so much is that the students are absolutely amazing. The art club students made those two books above, one from first graders and one from second graders (13 and 14 year-olds, respectively). Many students gave me artwork and special messages. On my desk, I found two thick packets of letters from most of the second graders (about 300 students). That's quite a bounty. I felt terrific reading them.
I received some gifts from teachers, too. One of the teachers I work with gave me some incredible artwork by her mother as well as some t-shirts from the company her husband works for, Capcom.
I'd told her I still like to play Rock Man (aka Mega Man) sometimes which may explain this shirt.
The judo teacher invited me to join him at an izakaya after school to celebrate his retirement and 60th birthday. We were joined by another teacher and had some incredible food and alcohol. I had whiskey while he had beer and sake. The izakaya was run by a former student of his who evidently loves The Beatles because that's all we heard all night. We had plate after plate of tempura, sashimi, karaage (Japanese style fried chicken), tofu, and various creative items including some kind of cut roll with bacon and avocado wrapped in lettuce. It was quite a send-off for me but I still dearly hope to return.
This is the latest comic I made for students. It's the first one I made for third year, 15 year old, students. I was surprised to find they were a little more reluctant to do it than the first and second year students. I guess hormones are starting to make them too cool for this kind of thing.
A few of them did produce some interesting things, once I explained what a squash is. For the third panel, one student wrote, "This is God's food!"
Third year students are supposed to be learning how to debate, a difficult thing to introduce into Japanese culture. Many of the teachers are also reluctant to broach the subject. I thought this might be a fun, very unconfrontational way to at least get them used to some of the language of debate. I was glad some of the students took to it. I had help from one student whom I regularly have long conversations with about horror movies. I tend to have one or two favourite students in every classroom who seem to appoint themselves my lieutenants and who go about making sure people stay on task.
The students finally prevailed upon me to come up with example dialogue so this is what I came up with on the spot.
Lately I've been seeing a lot of people talking about a Tennessee school board banning Art Spiegelman's Maus and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. As usual, the headlines make you think there are bonfires and goosestepping school officials chucking books into the flames. But then you read the article and it turns out the books are just being removed from the curricula due to depictions of nudity and incest. It's interesting people who are normally concerned about triggery content don't seem to be raising concerns about these things.
I certainly don't think these books should be banned. I'd absolutely make them available in the school library for students who are ready for the material. But speaking as someone who teaches eighth graders, the idea of making them required reading in a classroom strikes me as cruel. There may be a few students ready for this material but for most of them it's going to feel like punishment. I would argue the symbolism in Maus is probably too sophisticated for kids to whom you might need to explain that, no, Tom from Tom and Jerry is not a Nazi. And Toni Morrison I could see for senior year of high school, maybe, but overall I'd think she's college material, which is where I read her. And that's probably why young teachers are using her works--they'd just read her in college and lack the imagination to find books someone could appreciate from an eighth grader's perspective.
Why not teach Alice in Wonderland? Or Treasure Island? Why not make these kids excited about literature before hitting them with the hard stuff? More than anything, I feel there is a need to nurture a love for the medium rather than a need to expose kids to works designed as wrecking balls for concepts they're barely acquainted with and which probably seem irrelevant to them.
This isn't to say I don't think kids should be exposed to uncomfortable historical topics. One of the English books I teach from here in Japan has a chapter on Martin Luther King Jr. without any explanation of the history of race relations or slavery in the U.S. Japanese junior high school students naturally don't study U.S. history any more than U.S. junior high school students study Japanese history. So, when I've gotten to that chapter in the book, I've spent an entire class period giving them a lecture on the history of race relations and slavery in the Americas. But I don't do it using irony or complex symbolism. It's a straight forward lecture and that's what's appropriate for eighth graders whose reading level is currently Demon Slayer/Kimetsu no Yaiba.
I showed the Sleepy Hollow part of Ichabod and Mr. Toad to two classes of first year students to-day. One class was pretty quiet for it but I was really pleased with some big laughs and gasps from the second class. I already knew they were a particularly congenial, rowdy bunch of kids and maybe it shouldn't surprise me they were more receptive to old fashioned, zany American cartoon humour than some other classes.
It does get me thinking what a strange thing American cartoons were. The kids were saying, "Sugoi" and "sugei" (amazing) when Ichabod was stuffing whole pies in his mouth or swiftly avoiding Brom Bones' punches. Yeah, I realised, these are superhuman feats. It's weird how we tend not to think of it.
I took the opportunity to explain some western superstitions before the film so they understood when Ichabod avoided walking under the ladder and guided the black cat out of his path.
I showed part of Alice in Wonderland to second year students last week, the part where Alice grows big in the White Rabbit's house. Having shown it to a few silent student audiences, I was pleased to hear a group of girls really get into it. One girl laughed at just the right moment when Alice opens the shutters to peer out the window in giant form. I've discovered this girl's English is very strong.
"Why are you so good at English?" I asked her.
She shrugged, "I don't know!"
I followed up with one of my standard questions; "What did you eat for breakfast this morning?"
"Yoghurt, a chocolate doughnut, and hot cocoa!"
I'm used to kids just saying, "Rice," or, "Bread". The more I talk to her, the more I think she's the right audience for Alice in Wonderland. She's also a natural leader, like River Phoenix in Stand by Me. The other girls look up to her and I saw her comforting a girl who was crying after a difficult test. I'm continually amazed by the students I meet on this job.
I'm currently working at a very small junior high school, I'll be here for a month. I was here for a month last year at around the same time so I'm reconnecting with a bunch of students, some of whom barely remember me. One of the tiniest first year students who had seemed especially attached to me last year, though, is now a tiny second year student who definitely remembers me. She was a little sulky this year because she thought I'd forgotten her name but when I called her by name she immediately perked up and wanted to open a salvo of all her small store of English. I asked her to recommend an anime series to me. First she said, "Kimetsu no Yaiba."
"Everyone knows Kimetsu no Yaiba," I said. "What is something only you like?"
Her friends were gathered round as she thought and thought and they giggled when she finally said, "Jujutsu Kaisen."
"Everyone knows Jujutsu Kaisen!" I said.
Finally, she recommended Beastars, which I'd never heard of. I was happy to find the whole thing on Netflix when I went home.
I've seen the first two episodes now and it's not bad, pretty interesting, even. I'm not a fan of the furry aesthetic but this show doesn't have the super-ironic, anti-sexual, cloying furry humour. It imagines an alternate reality populated by strange animal/human hybrids. There's a social divide between herbivores and carnivores and eating meat is a big taboo. The show is set on a college campus where, at lunch time, the carnivores are forced to enjoy soy burgers.
The interesting thing is how assumptions of predatory instincts underlie all social interaction. The concept is a little similar to Zootopia but with a darker, distinctly Japanese edge.
The main characters are a wolf named Legoshi and a rabbit named Hal. Legoshi is in the drama club where a self-possessed, widely admired stag is at the top of the social food chain, regardless of where evolution may have placed him on the actual food chain. Legoshi is mostly pretty laid back, though he conceals anxieties about his own predatory instincts. When he starts to earn the stag's respect, he finds this respect makes him naturally want to work harder for the stag. This adds to anxiety over his suspicion that he may be a murderer, having found a desire to consume flesh occasionally overrides his conscious mind.
Hal, meanwhile, is ostracised because she's a slut. This is revealed in episode two and I laughed because, I thought, of course. She's a rabbit. But it makes for an interesting juxtaposition when Legoshi is shocked out of his anxiety over wanting to eat her to find she wants to eat him. So to speak.
It's very surprising in a Japanese series. Virginity is considered a virtue here for boys and girls. Girls proudly carry cherry charms on their school bags and boys brag about how they haven't had sex. Any time a character is portrayed as promiscuous in an anime, it's usually an older, often villainous, character, or the anime is out of the ordinary. So this one seems to be.
The animation is an interesting mix of cgi and 2d animation that hasn't gotten old yet but I suppose it might. The opening theme is some nice stop motion animation. The only thing that bugs me so far is that Legoshi wears suspenders and a belt--and his suspenders don't cross or connect in the back.
That video has over 39 million views!
Twitter Sonnet #1484
The yellow grass was hair from golden vaults.
The healthy drink produced a kind of bread.
We gathered late to drink a set of malts.
We cluster early honours fit for lead.
The slower light was waiting back behind.
For reasons lost the circuits took the chick.
You crank the pad to make the tape rewind.
Reversing streams creates a haunted brick.
At table five, the napkin carries weight.
A something schmutz defaced the bent lapel.
A mouth exceeds the mask it quickly ate.
Behold the bill and eyes of M. De Spell.
The lawless meat reflects a hungry moon.
A rabid dream permits a tasty boon.
Spider webs shroud the ripe persimmons near the junior high school, a sure sign of autumn here in Kashihara, Japan. Persimmons are associated with the season and persimmon trees can be found at the foot of the hill near the big junior high school where I worked up until to-day. To-morrow I go to a different, smaller school in another part of town but I will be going back to the big one in January. Until then, I'll be missing many of the students, particularly the art club students who all gathered together this afternoon to present me with artwork and say "Thank you!" in synchronous.
I would share the artwork but I'm not comfortable giving anything like personal details of students online. One girl expertly inked a drawing of Nezuko from Kimetsu no Yaiba dressed as a pirate. She knew I liked pirates and she knew Nezuko is my favourite character on the show. I couldn't tell her all the ways it was an appropriate gift for me.
Most of the artwork the students gave me was of characters from Kimetsu no Yaiba or Jujutsu Kaisen, though I have yet to finish seeing all the episodes of the latter. But it's what the students love so I'm very happy to receive it.
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.
The spiders are coming out in force. Three days into September and the cicada sounds have been replaced by cricket sounds to-night and it's remarkable how much it's starting to feel like autumn already. Last night I saw two frogs hopping down the stairs into a train station but I couldn't get a good picture. I hope they caught their train.
There's still cicada body parts everywhere. A cicada was a rare sight in San Diego. I'm getting used to the little nutcases here in Japan. I say little but they're like small birds zooming around, crashing into everything. On the stairwell outside my apartment the steps are littered with wings and abdomens and legs. I'd be surprise to see an intact corpse at this point.
Yesterday I started back working at the junior high school. I'm so happy to be back, though actually I'd been going there throughout the summer to help supervise the art club. These kids never get tired. They're in there, drawing and colouring, with pencils, paints, and inks while the brass band endlessly practices outside, the soccer team does muscle training, the kyudo team gracefully hit their marks, and the judo club throw down one another. This is Sparta.
In the art club to-day, a student and I were goofing around, trying to make another student break her poker face. I succeeded by singing "Mairzy Doats". I guess that's teaching English.
On a recent trip to Nara Park, I noticed the antlers on the deer are looking a lot bigger. Yesterday, I started working at the school where I spend most of my time again. I'd last been there in April and, since then, the third year students had graduated and everyone else moved up a grade. I can't believe how much the little first years have grown now that they're second years.
Mostly this week I've been working with third year students, though, and I was happy to see many of these former second year students, too. We played a game to-day to help them learn present and past participle adjectives. One teacher had come up with some "Who am I?" cards--the teacher reads three hints on the cards and then students have to guess who the teacher is. He asked me to make some additional cards that were more fun than what he had, which he could count on me doing because I know plenty about Kimetsu no Yaiba. One thing that's definitely not changed from last year is Kimetsu no Yaiba is the bible for these kids. All the cards I made ended up being much too easy.
I was struck by the subtle reverence the students exhibited when the answer to one card was Rengoku Kyojuro. It's easy to see why he would be an icon to students--the hero of the Kimetsu no Yaiba movie worked and trained all his life, respected his family and honoured his mother's wishes, and still he failed. With all the work these kids have to do, the pressure they're under and all the tests they have to pass, it's no wonder they'd sympathise with someone like Kyojuro. Though when I saw the Kimetsu no Yaiba movie, Kyojuro reminded me of Kyuzo in Seven Samurai. I sometimes wonder if Kyuzo was related to the psychological blow of Japan's loss in World War II. Now I wonder if Kimetsu no Yaiba is the latest iteration of the same story of sincere, rigorous effort rendered meaningless by a single, overwhelming catastrophe.
It's been hot and rainy here, it being the rainy season. Thus all the wild growth, the massive tide of green and flowers. It's nice to live somewhere with seasons.
Twitter Sonnet #1453
The giant wasn't big so people slept.
In dreams of rope the copper lantern falls.
In dusty flowers poison hearts are kept.
A sugar habit hardens sturdy walls.
A leather string connects the cows to years.
A ticking clock observes the frightened man.
The golden sun recalls a dearth of fears.
A chip of gold could scratch the iron pan.
The question cornered words across a sky.
Across a sea, the sentence fished for art.
The random seeds produced a myst'ry pie.
The brain absorbed an extra, senseless heart.
A steady rain encouraged second trips.
Encroaching sun in ocean coffee dips.
Behold, the fruits of an English lesson I gave to-day. I was asked to talk about Finland on short notice to a class of special needs students (I work at a junior high school in rural Japan). What do I know about Finland? All I could think of was the Monty Python song which, in retrospect, would've been pretty useful given that it specifically mentions Japan in the lyrics--the kids love it when their own country is referenced in the lessons. I also thought of Nightwish, the Finnish metal band I like, especially their stuff from when they had an opera singer on lead vocals. I drew a big bear (on the right) because I knew there were bears in Finland. Otherwise I had nothing until I remembered The Sampo.
Or as it's sadly better known in the U.S., The Day the Earth Froze, which is the version with bad English dubbing. It was famously featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But the original film is based on Finnish mythology and was co-directed by the great Russian fantasy director Aleksandr Ptushko, whose films are criminally difficult to acquire decent copies of in the U.S. So I started by drawing trees and then the mountains and the lake. Then I explained how the hero rode on logs, and I explained what a log was, and told them how one day he saw a beautiful woman and how they both were victims of a witch's jealousy. It was easy to put it all into simple English and I think it was a pretty good basis for a lesson plan.
The Day the Earth Froze was always one of my favourite episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a case where there was a strange blurring of the line between mockery and appreciation, at least for me. The film has some genuinely amazing visuals.
I remembered the host segment where Joel and the bots ask the audience to figure out just what a Sampo is. So when I came to my own version of the story I put it to the students--when the witch, who lives on a miserable island, jealous of the people in the village, demands the Sampo in exchange for freeing the beautiful woman, just what might the Sampo be? One of the students suggested, "Life."
"Maybe!" I said, "Good answer!" After all, you might say a big lump that spews endless quantities of salt and gold is basically life.
On a slightly unrelated subject, here's a giant bug I saw outside my apartment this morning.
I thought it might be dead so I tapped one of its antennae with the tip of my umbrella expecting it to scurry away if it was alive. Instead, the antennae slowly, lazily swung back. As though to say, "Yeah, I'm alive, and you don't scare me, human."
This is an unfinished drawing I've been working on in the art club of the Japanese junior high school where I've been working as an assistant English teacher. "You like love," said one of the students, looking at it. I guess that's true. I'm posting it now because I'll probably immediately give it away to one of the students when I finish as I've done with previous drawings. It's really relaxing drawing in that club and it's nice to be able to pass on some basic knowledge about pencilling and inking, the kind of stuff artbooks are reluctant to divulge. Though a lot of the kids need no help from me, wow. The kinds of drawings I see, I couldn't have dreamed of producing when I was in junior high. A group of girls sit with me while I draw and one of them likes drawing highly detailed clockwork dolls. All her drawings look like they came right out of a professional manga.
She joked that her friend is famous and, since I can't use my Japanese (part of my job is to create situations where the kids are forced to use English), I had to forgo the opportunity to use a joke in Japanese I actually managed to formulate, that for all I knew, everyone at the school was famous behind all the masks. It's a strange new world. It's gotten so it's positively weird when I see someone's face. When I leave school, I see lots of kids without masks while they're exercising--after two kids in China died from wearing masks while exercising in the heat, policy has relaxed to allow kids to remove their masks while playing sports. It's almost shocking to see so many bare faces. I have this strange impulse to cry out, "What are you doing, everyone? Hide!"
I'm really not sure how much good any of the rules are, though, when the kids are constantly hugging and wrestling between classes. It's kind of silly watching their horseplay one minute and then two minutes later watching them observe rules requiring them not to pass papers to each other. Hopefully the virus doesn't get too widespread in Japan. How do I tell kids not to hug each other?
Here are some of my recent photos:
I think I saw one of the fabled "murder hornets". It was dead.
Twitter Sonnet #1365
A paper bed confused the back at night.
The ocean spoke of heavy water eyes.
The mammals turned as motion bubbles might.
The darkest depths desist on open skies.
The numbers held in mind were one to ten.
Beyond the teens the dice create a void.
The mountains came to seem a woody pen.
The island served a cake too long enjoyed.
A little water floods the sugar sea.
The desert throat reports a set of sounds.
Entire drums of honey move the bee.
Another buzz precedes the lunar rounds.
The endless trunk contained forever leaves.
Resentful habit slights what thought achieves.
I'm coming to the end of my first week working as an assistant language teacher at a Japanese junior high school. It's mainly been a very nice experience, the students are very sincere and well behaved, though it's a little difficult to tell them apart when they all wear masks and uniforms. Aside from the masks, the only sign of Corona virus is the new set of social distancing rules requiring no two students to sit beside each other, a little pointless considering there seems to be plenty of physical contact outside of the classroom. For a culture about which I've constantly been told physical contact is frowned upon, I see a lot more hugging than at American schools. This might be a new trend. Fortunately, Corona seems down to pretty low levels though there's been an increase in cases in Tokyo.
One of the teachers seemed to expect me to be missing America, based on the questions she was asking me. I told her I'm happy to be in a country where there are currently no riots and I went on to tell her that the riots in the U.S. seem to have pushed Corona off the front page in every major publication. I'm working in a rural area so most people don't seem to know anything about George Floyd or the riots. I generally have the impression that people here are more focused on here than on the world. There's more of a sense of a connexion to the town and community than I'm used to.
It sure is hot. I'm told the rainy season is off to a late start which has been a worry for the farmers. Supposedly constant rain will begin next week--it will be rainy and hot. I wish I had more summer clothes.
