In any school you teach in Japan, you will meet that well-dressed, older woman--perhaps in her late fifties to early sixties--sporting brand-name bags, shoes, and accessories, who is shocked when other students admit they've never visited the country she just returned from on vacation.

She studies English because it is fun! and, incidentally, to communicate with foreigners while traveling abroad.

She smiles all the time, except when you correct her.

And she doesn't listen--not to the teacher, not to the other students.

She spends her free time shopping and cooking; maybe gardening.

She has nothing to talk about. She will start a conversation, and she does not ask questions.

Nor does she admit when she doesn't understand something. This causes a lot of in-class confusion, and stresses out the teacher.

She's in every school. And she is so, so nice!
 

His name means "purple." No, it's not his real name, but this kid is royal.

Three years old. Walks into my youngest group of kids for a demo lesson. Doesn't know the system, and his mother only had a five minute breakdown of the system beforehand. She waits outside the window.

I groaned inwardly. 99% of the time, this combination of factors would result in a little kid staring in wide-eyed horror or disbelief at the foreigner babbling at them in some indecipherable tongue. Tears and wailing might soon appear.

I greeted him warmly, and told him to sit down. As part of the regular lesson routine, I asked everyone (four students now) to take out their books.

"I don't have a book," Murasaki said.

I blinked, not sure I'd just heard a perfect English sentence. I checked his face. Maybe a English-speaking parent? But he showed no obvious signs of a mixed lineage. Hmm.

"That's okay," I said, testing the waters, as the other children struggled to pull textbooks and workbooks free of their tiny backpacks. "You can just use another kids book, okay?"

"Okay."

Blink again. "Do you speak English?" I asked warily.

He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. God, this kid is cute

He repeats everything perfectly, and when you ask him for something, he hands it over with a polite "Here you are." He can hold a limited conversation on very basic topics (I mean, come on, the kid is only three).

Turns out he's been taking English lessons since he was just six months old. Mom's been very keen, it seems.

Unfortunately, his joining coincided with our entire Kids system changing. In his second lesson, Murasaki needed to take a placement test. The tests had three parts: speaking, listening and writing.

In the speaking part, I'd ask him a question: "What is this?" pointing to a picture of a ruler. To get a point, the kid has to say, at least, "a ruler." The article is key.

He looked at me and said, "Ruler," no article, but with inflection that indicated very clearly, "Yeah, I know what this is. Man, ask me something harder."

No points.

Listening: kid is three. Didn't understand how to mark the sheet. Understood what I was saying, no problem, but too young to know how to mark the test--and we were under orders not to show children how to answer.

Writing: kid is three. Doesn't know how to write name, has trouble holding a crayon.

Murasaki--the exception. Thank you.


 

Have developed a small, harmless crush on one of our new students, a twenty year-old part-time cook at one of the local restaurants. She is quiet, mostly due to her insecurities being a new English student, but picks things up rather quickly and isn't afraid to speak when spoken to. She wears purple or silver leopard prints. A common character among her accessories is "Rat Fink." Now, this drew me to her immediately because, despite having seen my old childhood friend around Japan recently, I'd never run into anyone actually displaying the ugly, rat visage. I asked her about it, and she said, "Rat Fink?" I said, "That's not what we used to call him. I thought his name was Rat Fu--" I shut my mouth, realizing what I had almost said in my enthusiasm. She smiled but didn't recognize the name. Last night, she came to class with Kenny's head in her backpack. I said, "South Park!" and she started in surprise. "You know?" she asked. I wanted to say, "Yeah, I may be twice your age, but those things are still cool to me." A small crush, and I will keep it to myself.
 

Her pink fluffiness put me in immediate mind: that horrid 80's American pop star Tiffany, the fifteen year-old mall rat who sang sickly sweet and shook her acid-washed jeans for all the record company Frankensteins could get out of them.

Ah, but the Japanese Tiffany was not sexy. Not to say she wasn't attractive. She was tall, shapely, with long dyed-brown hair, great skin and a bright smile set in a pin-up girl's face straight off the nose of B-52 bomber. JT was beautiful.

(This "was" is kind of freaking me out. I want to elide it, erase it, but I could only manage to cross it out, leaving its trace behind. Even if the reader couldn't see it, they could, would, read it. "JT beautiful." Why? Because there's this sense of impermanence in the "was" that, at the same time, seems so locked in the past. I desire a word to give a sense of JT being beautiful past, present and future. "JT being beautiful" is close, but the (mis)readings, the connotations, are inexplicable, inextricable, and just plain friggin' annoying, and so myriad to list them would be a terrible waste of time. Wait! Where'd the woman go?)

JT was beautiful, but not sexy. I am still not sure whether it was a contrived neutering or not.

It's just that her contrived cuteness, the excessive amount of fluffy accessories, all colored pink, killed any sexual desire in the observer (unless they have a thing for little girls, I imagine). And she didn't seem very bright. She smiled, she was polite, and she did what was asked of her in class and no more, offering no additional information, asking no unnecessary questions.

She had just finished high school and was working at some office. She lived with her mother in a small, old apartment (as it turned out, in the same building, next door to mine). She liked J-pop, whatever was popular at the time, and got into the bathtub before washing--yes, I did spend a lot of time talking about it when she brought it up, but you should have seen her. She started at just above the absolute beginner level, having "not paid attention" in her compulsory English lessons. Why did she study English? "To make communication." I assumed she would last only a few months before giving up in frustration, especially once she realized this current trend of studying English came at a pretty high cost in terms of time, money, and effort.

That was seven or eight years ago. She stayed, even through the company's bankruptcy, sale, and zombie-like resurrection, maintaining the color scheme and fluffy-bunny style, but losing, ever so slowly, the friendly reserve. Three months ago, she went to New York for a month, returning with noticeably strong self-confidence and, yes, slightly improved English.

JT won. Thank you, JT.
 

Now that we are deep in the cold snap of early February, I would like to take time to note a group of students who have earned guarded respect: my elementary school students.

I teach at four elementary schools in the neighboring city. This is a position I have held for two years now. It is enjoyable, frequently rewarding, sometimes frustrating, a little frightening, and always educational—for me, not the students. How much English education these kids are getting depends greatly on their teacher, not on me, the assistant teacher, and some of these primary school teachers are more able and prepared to teach a foreign language than others. My respect for and fear of these kids comes from a couple of sources.

One, a point of fear, comes at the beginning of each lesson. Though it is an English class, I am required to stand in front of the students as they, as one, rise, bow, and follow their class leader in intoning: “Let’s start English class. Please teach us!” (Readers note: they say these things in Japanese, and I added the exclamation point to illustrate the strength of the request in Japanese.)

I’m not sure how other teachers feel about this, but it is very humbling, and not a little frightening, to have students requesting to be taught. It puts a great big load of responsibility right on my shoulders, and every time they do it, I wonder if I will manage to teach them anything that day. I know, from their point of view, it is just a phrase, a long-established ritual for starting the class, but I didn’t grow up with this ritual, and as such it can scare the bejeezus out of me.

Give me lazy, disrespectful, seemingly disinterested kids full of attitude any day—at least, that’s what I grew up with.

The second point concerns my respect for these kids—and frequent mind-boggled wonder. As everyone knows, 95% of schools kids in Japan are required to wear school uniforms. For elementary schools, this uniform is a white shirt for all, shorts for boys, and skirts for girls, leaving everyone’s legs bare above their blue socks and thin-soled white shoes. Jackets are worn in the colder months, though some children choose not to in order to prove their fortitude, especially as their walk to school on a freezing January morning.

But some of these kids don’t wear jackets inside the lesson rooms. The lesson room we teach English in almost never heated, or, if it is, is heated just enough to dispel ice from the blackboard not the clouds issuing from the students’ mouths as they speak. I should note the heating, when used, is provided via a gas stove at the front of the classroom where I and the teacher stand. Because this makes me feel guilty, watching the students sitting there freezing with their legs bare while I am wearing three layers of shirts, and two layers of pants and socks. I circulate among them, trying to stay away from the heater, to share in their cold, but soon return, the bottoms of my feet frozen, my fingers cold, shoulder and stomach muscles tense and tired from the efforts of not shivering.

How do they do it?

I ask them: “Are you cold?”

“Yes, cold,” they answer, some with teeth chattering.

But sit and do the lessons they do, and, just like kids everywhere, goofing off sometimes, occasionally cracking jokes among themselves, girls playing with other girls’ hair, boys playfully punching each other on the leg under the table.

I try to imagine students from my own school days in America, planted in this freezing classroom, doing anything but complaining. I can’t. First the students would complain to the teacher, and then to their parents, and then the parents would complain to the school board, and the school board would insist on adequate heating systems being installed so that students could concentrate during lessons. In the end, though, just like kids everywhere, they’d be goofing off sometimes, occasionally cracking jokes among themselves, girls playing with other girls’ hair, boys playfully punching each other on the leg under the table.

After my initial shock at the lacking of heating in classrooms, I asked around as to why the situation isn’t remedied. Surely schools have enough money to invest in a few extra heaters and kerosene?

The parents and grandparents have answered, to a man, alike: “If you make the students comfortable all the time, they won’t learn to make do and to bear up in bad times.”

Central heating in the classrooms, janitors to clean the schools, three months of vacation in the summer—when my Japanese students ask questions about the existence of such things in American schools, I cannot help but wonder if they are thinking the same as I: must it be good to be spoiled so?

 

She'd been a student at the branch long before I'd arrived, and she'd gotten used to, and loved, the way the other, earlier teachers had...well, pandered to her. She was in her seventies, wore expensive-looking clothes, and caked on the foundation and red lipstick to all almost clownish level. Still, she was sharp as tack, witty, and personable. Except for one thing.

"Aren't Indians clever?"

Um. Clever means, like, um, narrow intelligence? It's not a compliment, actually, not when you describe a whole people that way."

"Oh. So, they weren't clever?"

Months later, I brought in a picture of a Nez Perce from the 19th century. All the students admitted that, except for the clothing, he looked every bit a handsome Japanese man. The Queen didn't admit to such, but she did say he was handsome.

"Why don't you call them Native Americans?" she asked, obviously perturbed. "All the other American teachers said we should call them that."

"I don't think changing their name will change the way they've been mistreated. I grew up calling them Indians, and that's how we've always treated them. They were, by and large, not treated as humans, so I would rather keep the name that reflects the racism of those white Europeans rather than erases it. We need to remember. Like the Ainu."

"Who?"

"The Native Japanese."

"Oh."

And later: "Why did the Pilgrims hate the Native Americans so much?"

"That's pretty complicated. Anyway, are you asking about the first Europeans to go to the Americas, or the later British Protestants? It all has some to do with racism, some with religion, some with differing conceptions of land rights and property--"

"Why can't you just answer the question?" She was tapping her foot.

"Um, I'm trying. But you're talking about about several different tribes of Indians, several different European countries over the span of a hundred years or more. It's complicated."

"The other American teachers told me the Pilgrims were from Britain."

"Well, I'm not sure what you mean by 'Pilgrim'. Do you mean the first Europeans to go to the Americas? If so, they weren't Pilgrims, they were Spanish and Portuguese businessmen looking to make a profit. Then came the Dutch, the Germans, the French and the British. The Pilgrims came later."

"OK. Whatever. Why did they all hate the Indians?"

"Like I said, it's complicated. There are several books on the history. If you like, I can recommend you a few."

"You know, we come here to have a good time," she said, her tone withering. "Not to be lectured to."

"I was just trying to answer your question honestly."

"That's is not why we come here. We come here to have fun, not to be corrected. This is Voice Room, and we come here to have an easy time and fun conversation."

"You did ask those questions. I should let you know that my first wife was an Indian, and I grew up around Indians, though in a pretty racist place. I think my opinions are worthwhile, and I was just trying to help you understand the complexity of the issue."

"Maybe you are in the wrong place."

"Maybe I am."
 

"Good morning, Miki."

"Good morning, Charles-sensee."

"What are you doing after today's lesson?"

"I am regi," she said, a statement which meant "I work at as a clerk at a register," but which could also mean "I am a register."

Remembering Miki gets me to thinking about two things: the relative immobility of Japanese society, and the mindset of a teacher. But, first, let's return to Miki and her odd phrase "I am regi."

I'd actually met her there before I met her at the school, though she'd been a student of the school for a few years prior to my arrival. She'd been one of my first students, and she worked as a supermarket clerk in the store just downstairs of my apartment at that time.

Well, maybe I should say she was a supermarket clerk. You see, it's a strange difference of phrase to say one is a supermarket clerk versus one works as a supermarket clerk. The former sounds so permanent, the more polite, less constricting. In Japan, where work is considered largely permanent, and where you might introduce yourself by giving your company name first followed by your family name followed by your "first" name, and especially where social mobility is limited and the practice of changing jobs is perceived as weakness through lack of resolve, the phrase "I work as a ___________" just isn't used.

Perhaps that is why Americans prefer the later, to reflect the belief that our identities are separate from our work. Of course, this practice is ignored when our work carries some sort of cultural prestige, as in "I am a scientist," "I am a politician," or, even, "I am a teacher."

When people asked, I introduced myself as a teacher. I'd rather have introduced myself as a writer, because there's more prestige though less money as a writer.

Miki introduced herself as a supermarket clerk.

She was a friendly, cheerful, plump girl in her early twenties, who studied English as a hobby, as something special, even exotic, to set her apart. She'd started at the bottom and worked her way in four years to 7A, the third level from the bottom in a ten-level system.

Why? Was it a lack of intelligence or facility with languages that held her back? I seriously doubt it. her comments never showed me anything except a young woman who, having performed moderately well in compulsory education, having never set herself apart intellectually or physically, had settled down into what she felt comfortable perceiving as her place in life: a supermarket clerk, and supermarket clerks are never, mind you, bright.

Before you, reader, get angry, mind you that I do not share this opinion. That was just he impression Miki gave every time she refused to push herself--and this is where I fail as a teacher.

A teacher should not only recognize a student's weaknesses and strengths, they should, by dint of much effort, be able to coax the best effort out of that student to utilize their abilities to the fullest, but also to recognize the limits of their students and mold instruction to fit within those limits. That is why teaching is a fine art, not a science; a performance above and beyond strict methodology, wherein the performer both elicits and reads the responses of their audience, but is in turn and/or simultaneously influenced and changed by that multitude of myriad reflexes as the audience both responds to the teacher's performance and, de ja, is a performer (and performers) themself (themselves).

I--however much I may recognize a students apparent limits--do not believe in those limits.

Miki would clam up in at the beginning of any lesson that seemed "difficult," no matter how many times she'd done it before, no matter how the instructor might try to tailor it to her ability, no matter how similar the content may have been to another lesson she'd just complete. It was "difficult".

I wonder if this may have anything to do with the educational system in Japan. I have been teaching at elementary schools in Japan now for two years, and I have noticed some significant differences to the American system, differences which color my observations and should be noted.

Before a lesson, (good) teachers consult me as to the lesson content for that day. This both gives me a little warning (something I requested) and to see if we can quickly brainstorm any different approaches to the lesson to benefit the students. Invariably, and recently annoyingly, the teachers comment along the lines that maybe the children can't do it or, worse, ask, "Do you think they can do it?" Once, a teacher apologized for not preparing the children sufficiently.

The lesson's focus was saying at what time they did a certain action during the day: "I go to be at 9:30," for example. The teacher set up the lesson to have students work in pairs and tell each other three sentences. I agreed to the idea, but as I listened to children barking out declarative sentences without any context or attempt at communication, I winced, and off the top of my head called the class to attention and instructed the students to work in pairs, with one student asking the question "What time do you __________?" and the other answering. I figured we shouldn't waste precious class time on activities that didn't give students a chance to practice conversation. I had the class listen and repeat the question a few times and then set them on their way--whether or not they got the question right wasn't as important as using English as a tool to communication, question and answer. For the most part, the muddled through, while a few did very well. The teacher looked awkward for the remainder of the lesson, and afterwards said, "I am sorry we didn't practice the question first."

"Why are you sorry?"

"Because they didn't use it very well." I got the impression she suspected I was offended at "how poorly" her students used my native tongue when, in all honestly, I couldn't have given a sh*t less about their accuracy so much as their engagement.

I have also noted that most teachers in Japan will say to their students that this material "is difficult, I know," no matter how simple the content may actually be.

This, I believe, stems from the pedagogical approach in Japan to teach lessons aimed at the lowest ability student and to discourage the "standing out" of low or of high performers. So, when a teacher says some material is difficult, it is a statement that means "for some of you this material is difficult; for others it will be too easy, but you shouldn't act as if it is." One result of this process is that, as with Miki and most of my ESL students in Japan, once a student does perceive a lesson as being difficult, they feel no responisibility for pushing themselves to engage the material past their own comfort level, either for fear of shaming themselves or for shaming others.

If this sounds like a purely academic difference between Japanese and American educational practice, one without real, appreciable effects, then have not thought about it long enough: it is not without some envy that parents in Japan envy the American system's ability to produce independent thinkers able to research and write their own essays; just as it is not without some envy that parents in America envy the Japanese system's ability to produce well-behaved students excelling in mathematics and science.

At the supermarket register, as I was buying some dinner, Miki asked me in Japanese how I knew the Japanese for "take it out of one thousand yen."

"I listened to the other customers," I said.

"Sugoi," she said. Great! "I couldn't do that in English."

"I think you can," I said. "You've been studying for four years, right?"

She waved my compliment off and assured me she couldn't.

"But I really do think you could," I persisted, trying to build some confidence in her.
She maintained it was too difficult, until I relented and took my food to my apartment.
At the time, I didn't think much of the exchange: it was typical of so many students.

You, dear reader, have no idea how frustrating this is for me, who pretends to be a teacher. My students are secure in belief in their own inferiority--they find a certain comfort in conforming to the lowest denominator, though it means holding themselves back. They excuse poor English test performance by claiming a shared cultural (even racial) inability to speak English. Believing it to be racial (for Japanese people are a race distinct from all other races, and no other people has such difficulty speaking English as Japanese people, they have maintained over the years), they have created a self-fulfilling prophecy, mutually reinforcing and bound by conformity.

I work as a teacher, but I am not a teacher. A teacher would be able to take these facets of the Japanese educational system and work them to their students' advantage. I, on the other hand, after more than eleven years of teaching in this country, have changed nothing of my disregard for student limits and comfort levels, have developed a stress-induced case of IBS, am balding, am haunted by eleven years of lost career advancement, and hear a little devil screaming frustrations in my ear as I smile in my best attempt to put nervous students at their ease, students seeing me as a teacher. (An unfortunate product of English grammar is that this idea cannot be properly conveyed: "students see me teacher see them students" is more fitting.)

"Good morning, Miki."

"Good morning, Charles-sensee." She would, or could, never refer to me by my name only. Always and everyways, and by every word, she attached the title, as much for my "honor" as for securing her role.

After eleven years of living in Japan, I have finally lost my oh-so-American innocence. You see, or I see, there are no innocent exchanges in Japan; there are multitudes of formalized exchanges, as sterilized as possible to avoid causing offense, but none of them can justly be considered as a means of "just shooting the breeze."
 

There are good and bad days—usually more bad than good. The good days shine through with their exception; the bad run together into a stinking, brown miasma threatening to cloud the good days from view. Sometimes humor helps support you, cracking jokes the students never get. Sometimes forty-minute conversation practice with a beautiful female student lifts you up. Sometimes even a nasty hang over can be a godsend.

Toshimura was an intelligent woman in her late fifties, a producer for a local TV station, who enjoyed gardening and studying English in her free time. Like many students, her knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary was pretty good, but her nervousness and lack of self-confidence impeded her conversational ability. In terms of topics and interests, I had no problems talking with her, but she never trusted herself enough to complete a sentence. In fact, most of the time she would stop after one word, lifting the intonation at the end of it as if she was asking “is this the right word?”

How the !@#$ should I know? They are your thoughts. I can’t read your mind. Just say it! Oh, thank God! Here’s the next word. No! No, no, no, no, no, no no! Don’t stop! Not again! ARGGGGHHHH!

These thoughts would lead me to become a bit snippy in lessons, urging her to not worry about mistakes, just spit it out and trust the other person to understand what you meant. But she never could take the advice to heart, and as a result our lessons were never chummy as her nervous production chipped away at my resolve to be patient.

She took lessons about twice a week, usually in the mornings or early afternoon. One Sunday, I had her for my first lesson. That same Sunday, though, I was hung over. Heck, I was still drunk, having been out drinking with this Scottish guy until two-thirty in the morning, waking up at 7:30 a.m. and catching the 8:30 train to the school.

I walked into the room, tired, sluggish, my body and soul craving to be elsewhere: my futon, the teacher's room floor, the toilet. Anywhere.

“Good morning!” I said in my best chipper-teacher voice.

“Good morning,” she returned.

“How are you?”

“I am good. And you?”

“I am sleepy,” I said with a laugh, knowing full well she could see the deep circles around my eyes. “What are you doing today?”

Oh, and by the way, whenever she started to feel nervous about her English, her face drained of all emotion, her eyes widened, and she stared. This she did now.

“I---am---going---shopping,” she said, though you would swear she was asking a question.

Normally, such a sentence, so early in the lesson, would’ve had my devil clawing at my
skin:God d@mn it! Not already. We’ve just started! But, today, the alcohol combined with the lack of sleep (and certain domestic concerns) had changed his tune, suprising me: Oh.

“How was the birthday party yesterday?”

“It was…” she paused as if to read my expression, “good?”

I waited for her to continue, to add some extra details. I knew she could.

She sat, staring at me with those big eyes and expressionless face.

“What did you do at the party?” I prompted.

“Chatting?” she queried.

“Yes? Anything else?”

“Cake---it was---good---also---chigau---too.”

I prodded the devil: Are you getting this?

Yes! he replied, grumpily, as if he’d been shaken awake. Whad’ya want me to do about it?

Nothing. I just wondering if you were there.

The conversation between myself and Toshimura continued while, unbeknownst to her, my devil and I kept a running argument.

I ain’t doing sh@t. No matter what we say, she ain’t gonna change.

“What do you think are some of the biggest problems in Japan today?”

But we can’t just let it go. She’ll never improve without guidance.

“I think---the---biggest?---problems in Japan---is---are---Fukushima.”

I’m tired. Let her alone. She’s just killing time.

“Yes. That is a big problem. Anything else?”

We have to help her.

“Unemployment?”

No we don’t.

“And what do you think we should do about unemployment?

I like you better when you’re sober.

“Make---businessman---work---less---than---eight hours---a day.”

Well, I like you better when you’re drunk. Not such a uptight pr#ck.

“And how would that help?”

You are calling me and uptight pr#ck?? Look, why are getting angry at her?

“Then---younger---workers---can---get---jobs.”

God, you’re an idiot. I am too tired. I don’t care. I have given up. Leave me alone.

The remaining thirty minutes crawled by. I wrapped up the lesson, and noticed how she seemed no different this time than any other time: still that nervous, frozen look on her face, still that uncertainty surrounding my "Have a nice day," still that bunny-rabbit tension in her body, that fight-or-fight-but-probably-flight sense radiating from her statues-like posture. I hadn't corrected her once. Every mistake she'd made, I'd let slide. I thought it should've made her more relaxed, and thus more open to conversation. It should've, at the very least, struck her as unusual. But there was nothing in her expression that betrayed any sense that this lesson had been any different than the others.

Can we sleep now?

No. We've got seven more lessons to get through. You ready?

...


 

Yasuki

He’d been a high school student when I first met him back in 2000, a tall, slender boy in school uniform who, when he smiled, curved the corners of his lips so high his eyes disappeared as his eyelids pressed tightly together. His orange and brown dyed hair had been longer than school rules allowed, but remained so for the year I had lessons with him.

I’d forgotten about him until he popped up at a wedding. I hadn’t seen him since he graduated high school some six years before.

The wedding was of a friend of my wife’s. Wedding guests in Japan having to pay anywhere between $200 and $300 to attend the ceremony and reception, I stayed home, coming by to pick her up later in the evening. More than forty people milled about the hotel’s restaurant, drinks in hand, chatting and laughing, the somber colors and cuts of their western business suits and evening dresses brightened by a fair number of brightly colored kimono. I found my wife talking animatedly with her friends, her face slightly red from alcohol. In a rare moment of alcohol-induced expressiveness, she acted very happy to see me, and even gave me a big hug, and then stood with her arm around my waist as she introduced me to all her friends. If you don’t know, this level of physical public contact is rather rare in Japan, especially between husbands and wives. I detail it not to boast how loving my wife could be, or to lament that she only acted this way when drunk on champagne, but to highlight the obvious relationship between herself and I. She detached herself from me presently to rejoin the conversation.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. Surprised, I turned and immediately recognized Yasuki’s smiling face.

“Do you remember me?” he asked sheepishly.

“Of course I do? How have you been?”

“You do? I am good.”

“What are you doing these days?”

It took him a moment to work out that question. “I am an office worker. Sorry, it has been long time no study English.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s just good to see you.”

He smiled. “You still living in Japan?”

I laughed. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

Oh, that simple comment brought back so many memories. I decided to test him further. I beckoned my wife over. She gave me a hug and asked who this was.

“This is Yasuki. He used to be a student of mine. Yasuki, this is M#####.”

Yasuki and my wife exchanged polite greetings in Japanese. I thanked her and told her to get back to her friends. She did so, stumbling slightly, but happy. He looked at me, puzzled. “Who’s that?” he really didn’t seem to know. I had to laugh.

As an English student, Yasuki’d been an average performer. His vocabulary was fair, his grammar poor, but his willingness to speak, when called on, was good enough to keep him from exasperating the teachers. His weakness as a communicator—and as a student, in my opinion, though it suited the Japanese education system just fine—was his seeming inability or unwillingness to come to any conclusions on his own.

We’d be reading an example post card in class: I am having a great time in Maldo. The weather is warm and beautiful. The people are friendly. I love the food. The Frante is very delicious. Wish you were here.

Yasuki would raise his hand and ask: “What is Maldo?”

Now, as an educator (and an asshole, according to a couple other “teachers”), I don’t like to answer a student’s question when I think they can come to the answer on their own with a little independent consideration. So, I asked him: “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, well, let’s think about it. Look at the sentence. She says she’s having a great time in Maldo. What do we use ‘in’ for?”

“Time and place?”

“Yes. So, can we say, ‘I’m having a great time in 2pm’?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, we can’t. Can we say, ‘I’m having a great time in Tokyo’”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, we can. So, what do you think ‘Maldo’ is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Really? OK. Well, the first letter is big. Do you know what that means? No? It means it’s the name of a person, place or thing. Which do you think ‘Maldo’ is: a person, place or thing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” I would say with growing frustration, “we said that we use ‘in’ with a place, and a big first letter might mean this is the name of a place. Place, place. What do you think?”

He said nothing, just smiled nervously and waited for me to provide the answer. This happened again when he asked what ‘Frante’ was. No matter how much I held him by the hand and led him towards the answer, he either refused to make that leap himself, or simply couldn’t. I don’t know. After years of working within the Japanese education system, and seeing how many teachers run their classrooms, with students waiting for or even demanding precise instructions of every step—to the point where, when a teacher announces they will write their answers in the book, the students will not take out a pencil or pen unless so instructed. It is an education system founded on rote memorization, emphasizing “right” answers. Yasuki, for all his rebellious hairstyle, was a prime example of what is produced in such a system.
 

Junji smiled all the time, was friendly, personable, chatty, out-going, spoke reasonably good English, traveled to other countries, held no gross stereotypes himself though his parents thought you couldn’t trust a Korean, treated women as his equals while finding them utterly fascinating, and I couldn’t stand him.

That’s not entirely true.

There were some days I could talk to him without forcing on my smiley face. I don’t know why, though, most other days, he just drove me up the wall.

Maybe it’s because he never argued with me. Not to say that he agreed with everything I said. Not at all. He expressed different opinions than I, strongly sometimes. Maybe it was that he gave differing opinions to mine without actually providing any reasons.

Oh, and the fact that he wasn’t interested in studying so much as just talking in English really drove me around the bend.

You see, I’d try to fulfill my role as “teacher,” and when he made mistakes, I would try to let him know the correct way to say it. He’d smile, nod, and then continue talking. Days, weeks, months later, I’d catch him making exactly the same mistake. Frustrating, but only if you care about helping people learn. If, like so many other ESL "teachers" in Japan, you are simply interested in getting through the day and then going out for a better afterwards, then Junji was a welcome relief.

But why should I have let it frustrate me? I knew the title “teacher” was pure sales pitch, bitch. The higher-ups had told me themselves each and every time I was up for disciplinary action.

“You are too strict with the students.”

“I am correcting their mistakes.”

“You are correcting too much.”

“What is my job here? Am I a teacher?”

“Yes, but not in the way you think. Your approach to teaching is too pedagogical. If you don’t make the students happy, they won’t come back. And then what will you be left with?”

“A school with interested, dedicated students?”

Well, he was interested, and he did try to improve his English—he just wasn’t interested in any feedback from me on the matter. I think that’s what frustrated me: that he didn’t find anything I had to teach worth listening to. There’s nothing like spending ten years in higher education, earning a couple of degrees, in English nonetheless, to take a job you are clearly overqualified for, only to have a student treat you as if you were nothing more than a sounding board. Nothing like it at all, you betcha.

And he was handsome.

A few of the female students asked after him: how old he was, if he lived around here, what countries he had visited (not, it should be noted, if he was single).

Was I jealous? Possibly.

He was in his late twenties, a part-time working living in town with his parents, and had traveled widely over Asia and North America, and free lifestyle with lots of free time—a freeta in the local vernacular.

He was annoying. Why? He was the center of attention in every room. That was my role, usually—anytime he wasn’t there. Yes, I had been something of a nerd before I came to Japan, but I’d never been the stereotypical nerd who comes to Japan just so people will treat him as if he is interesting. But in teaching English, I had found a venue that allowed me to speak volumes on subjects that interested me, should I control the conversation, or to be the center of attention in a conversation should I interject a comment. With him…well, he was a judo wrestler in a conversation, taking whatever I said to him and throwing it aside effortlessly.