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 |  The beauty and horror of what I have seen and felt in 11 years of teaching ESL in Japan. |
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After 11 years of teaching English conversation in Japan for the biggest money-grubbing school, which went bankrupt through very corrupt business practices, I feel the time has come to either share what the beauty and horror of this experience, or sink further into the desperate frustration of the misunderstood. What will follow are descriptions of the students I have taught, my observations and thoughts of them, and tidbits of their conversations with me. Names will of course be changed to protect identities. It is my hope that through reading these descriptions, people interested in learning about Japan and its culture will find new, unexpected insights into its people. So, without further ado, I need to start. But who to start with? The good or the bad? |
| I don't remember his name. He was shortish, tanned, fairly handsome, and built like a brick s***house. Amiable, with a pleasant smile on his face. Clean shaven, well-groomed, bright, personable, intelligent. Glasses, and medium-length black hair just brushing his broad shoulders. He was, unaccountably, single. I guessed it was because he was too busy. In any situation, you would've assumed he was an athlete, and you wouldn't have been far wrong. He coached soccer to special-ed and physically handicapped children. He worked ten hours a day at this, seven days a week, even in his free time--especially in his free time. The actual working hours were short, so he made little money. What money he didn't spend on bills, he saved to study English and to travel overseas to take courses in helping special needs children. Sometimes you meet people whose generosity makes you uncomfortably aware of how self-centered you secretly are. It is difficult to talk to such people. Of course, you try. You try to express your admiration for them, or, feigning self-criticism, you might even say how you regret not doing more charitable work. But the reality is: you don't, you didn't, and you most likely won't. And it's not because you are a bad person. It's because you are not that self-less. Very, very few people are. I am, for example, as self-centered as a gyroscope. I walk around, my head full of stories, obsessing over my life's problems, talking to myself as often as not. Some people react to self-less people angrily or jealously. A Christian might criticize him for not having been Christian, and thus choosing the path to Hell. A Buddhist might well have criticized him for not being dedicated enough to prayer, and thus slaving himself to material concerns. An Australian might have criticized him for being too polished. A Chinese might have criticized him for being Japanese ignorant of his own country's brutal history. A woman might have criticized him for not settling down to raise a family and choosing a job with better pay. A man might have criticized him for seeming gay. I criticized him for his inaccurate use of relative pronouns. "This is drive car," he would say. "This is the car I drive," I would correct. "He is playing guitar man." "He is the man playing guitar." And he would laugh about it. We laughed quite a bit together, actually, his inability to switch easily from Japanese to English grammar providing ample opportunities for corrective feedback. He always came in for lessons on Wednesday nights, always man-to-man. He was preparing for his next trip to L.A., to attend a conference on sports coaching for the handicapped. "One week," he said with a nervous grin. "You'll be fine. Just remember: if you don't understand what someone says, ask them to repeat themselves." "But what about during a presentation?" "Take notes? Ask if they have anything in writing? I really don't know, but I'm sure you'll be fine." "You think so?" "Yes, I do." Yes, I do. |
| There are nerds, and there nerds, varying in type and degree. The important thing is to not confuse the varying types. As Brain Posehn rightly pointed out: “Nothing pisses of a nerd worse than getting his obsession wrong.” Back grew up in the 80’s in the U.S., we were told it was easy to spot nerds: slick, black hair, horn-rimmed safety glasses, pocket protectors. In 21st century Japan, the local species are not so easily spotted: they are everywhere, and they are nowhere. And pocket protectors don’t seem to exist. Ando was a high school student, a first year when I met him, but I continued to teach him for three years until he graduated and moved away--probably a good thing given his mother, a nervous wreck of a woman who often took lessons, sometimes with her son. He was shy, awkward, quiet, and his face hosted an angry army of pustule-primped pimples. I never saw him in anything but his school uniform, even when he took lessons on the weekends. He always spoke last, and only did the minimum necessary to get through a conversational situation. If he asked a question, it was only under the direction of the teacher. It took me a year to get to know him better. The subject was video games. We got to talking about Minna no Golf 3 (or was it 2), “Everybody’s Golf,” the Playstation 2 golf game. I had been playing it quite a bit at that time, and was curious if he’d ever played. He had. Of course he had. I asked him how to unlock the final character, and he told me. Then I asked him what his best score had been. “21 under par,” he said. Zeus pass me a thunder bolt; I’m going to righteously smote this mother, and condemn him to eternity in the underworld. Let Cerebus or that damn vulture feed on his entrails for all I care. 21 under par is insane! You’re getting birdies on every hole, and eagles on a few. Here I was, thinking I was hot s*** getting 13 under par after about a year of game play. I’d even managed one eagle on a par 3. That was lucky. 21 under par does not involve luck--it involves huge amounts of time and training. The kid’s thumbs must’ve had ninja reflexes spiked with Spiddy senses; the rest of him was just gangly sack of meat and bones locked in a perma-slouch. And that made perfect sense given what he was going to Kyoto to study after he graduated high school. Ando, however, didn’t know the English word when he divulged his dream job. Instead, he mimed it to me. To a writer, or even possibly to a teacher, the act of sticking your index and thumb together and wiggling it looks a heck of a lot like scribbling on a piece of paper with a pen. “You’re going to be a writer?” “No.” Again, he mimed the action, less patiently this time. “Um..” I said, watching him, “you’re going to study more, go to university maybe?” “Yes...no!” he said, realizing what I meant. “No. This!” He repeated the gesture, more vigorously than before. I mean: come on! Cut me some slack. Nothing in my life up to that point could have prepared me to guess what this kid was getting at. I grew up white trash in the Northwest of the U.S.: sure, there were plenty of hippies, but what he was miming was not something that cropped up in everyday conversation. And, besides, I suck at charades. “You’re going to be an office worker??” I hazarded, out on a limb, grasping for straws, the frustration obvious in Ando’s face. He didn’t even protest. He just rocketed up out of he seat and stormed to the front desk. I assumed I must’ve really pissed him off. He spoke earnest to the staff for half a minute. One of them disappeared into the teacher’s room. I thought they’d gone to complain to my manager, the ALT, who was at that time grabbing a quick bite of lunch before hurrying off to the pachinko parlor on his break. Then, the staff member and Ando returned to the room with an opened dictionary. “A-cu-punc-ture,” Ando managed slowly, carefully, attending each accent on the pronunciation guide, his face rapt in concentration, making the last syllable rhyme with "puree". Behind him, the staff member looked at me, slightly worried, slightly confused. Acupuncture! Yeah, that’s right. Acupuncture. How many kids have you met who plan on moving to Kyoto to learn the fine are sticking needles in people? I would never have guessed. All of my high school friends (none of whom were actually in high school, having either already graduated, dropped out, or been kicked out) were more intent on drinking until they threw up, passed out, or, preferably, both. Ando the acupuncturist. I imagine him in a temple in Kyoto, wearing a flowing, white robe, eyes intent upon an expanse of skin, reading the nerve centers hidden away, gauging the aim and the pressure just right before plunging the needle in. |
| Nice guy and fairly bright. Not handsome, certainly, but kind and self-effacing. His face broke into a huge, warm grin anytime he became embarrassed or shy, which was quite often, actually--it could take as little as a compliment to make him smile, though he smiled not out of gratitude. He worked at a local factory making compressors. He'd been working at the same plant for about twenty years when I met him, and was afraid the boss would discover he studied English. "Why?" "They might send me to work at the factory in China." Not that he had anything against China, really. It's just that he was so settled here, his hometown, he didn't want to leave. "But if they ask me, I will have to." Except for his voice, he was fairly nondescript and kept a low profile. He spoke a in a deep, gravely baritone, like Tom Waits had gargled battery acid. On days when I had a hangover, I imagined, every time he spoke, the walls of our little classroom resonating and amplifying the frequency, so that the cilia inside my ear were being flattened like young trees in a wind storm. It was uncanny: he spoke quietly, he spoke little, but when he spoke, I could feel the vibrations in the air, shaking me, waking me, making me alive, so that little rabbity part of my self, the one enabling me to smile even at people I hate, (the social part of me, I guess you could say), would cower, shivering, in the corner until the scary man with the huge voice went away. Other days, when I wasn't hungover, it wasn't so bad. In fact, it could be kind of a pleasant feeling, like popping some quarters into one of those hotel beds marked "Magic Fingers" and then laying down to stare at the ceiling, all the while catching snatches of conversation about someone's day or recent political commentary. In the end, his boss did discover his English ability and, sure enough, shipped him off to work as a manager in the China plant, without, of course, a pay raise. He's been there for a couple of years now, learning Chinese, forgetting his English, loving the beer. His biggest complaint about living there is his sensitive stomach has trouble with the food, but, otherwise things seem to be going well for him. We've lost touch, last seeing each other about a year ago as he was shopping around for English lessons. I was disappointed he didn't choose me (I have no idea who, if anyone, he did choose), because not only was his was the most amazing voice, one that didn't match at all the shy, grinning face projecting it, but he did know how to hold a conversation, and he had become my "foreigner," someone with interesting stories to tell about another country, a window into another, more interesting world, even if the voice delivering it sometimes seemed to be vibrating my ear drums loose of their moorings. |
| What do you call it when you keep doing the same thing over and over again, even though it causes you frustration, even pain? Is it masochism? Is it autism? Whatever it is called, I've got it, and got it pretty bad. To give you an example, at the start of every lesson, I ask students: "Do you have any questions?" It's a fairly common question in Western classrooms, but in Japan it is unheard of. I realized this in the first week of classes. Every student looked at me confused, or gasped in surprise, or, worse, panicked and tried to quickly think of a question. Many thought I was ordering them to ask me a question. I could have dropped it there, just stopped asking: "Do you have any questions?" I didn't, though. I felt it was polite to give students a chance to ask a question that had been bothering them, or a question they had prepared beforehand. At any rate, if the goal of ESL education in Japan really is to prepare students for "real world" English, then they'd better get used to people not leading them around but instead expecting them to lead themselves. To avoid misunderstandings, I would tell students: "You can say 'No' if you don't have a question." If necessary, I would explain the cultural differences. Most students get it pretty quick. But not all. That brings us to Junichiro, the epitome of "salaryman": skinny, suit-clad, bispeckled, and utterly lacking in all social graces save one: he could, when pressed, sweat profusely, so that rivers of perspiration would run down his shiny, bug-eyed face. Sorry. That's not really a social grace, is it? Maybe you could cal it a survival trait? Maybe, when zombies attack, he can make himself as slick as a greased pig and slip out of their mortified grasp? Anyway... Junchiro never got it. He just never got it;any of it. For the first five or so lessons, despite hearing other students' responses, "Do you have any questions?" caused his face to light up in panic, and he'd freeze, literally, unable to look around, just stare at me, and the sweat would start to form on his forehead. I explained to him what the question meant, and how he could respond. Things changed after that. Boy, did they change... "Good evening." "Good evening." "Do you have any questions?" "Hai. Do you like soccer?" "Um...no? Not really. I'm not much of a sportsman." Did I mention the guy was sensitive? Not in a potpourri sniffing kind of way, but in the way of those with low self-esteem who feel anything other than a bright, welcoming smile is a sign of hostility. My slight, fleeting look of confusion, at wondering why he was asking such an off-topic question, caused him to stare at me in a cold, downright chilly, yet still sweaty, way. Take that, physics. Or, later: "Hello." "Hello." "Do you have any questions?" "Hai. What do you do after dinner?" Again, the off topic question. So, I explained: "'Do you have any questions' doesn't mean you have to ask a question. It's okay if you don't have a question. Just say, 'No.' It's no problem." Later: "Do you have any questions?" "Hai," he said, and then consulted his notebook. A promising sign, yes? He'd prepared a question before coming in. "What does...sorry, no. Why does...why do? Why do you happy today?" "Um. Did I say I was happy?" "No." "Do I look happy?" "No." "Then why did you ask that?" No answer. Just: stare, sweat, stare, sullenly. Turns out, after a couple more exchanges like the one above, he complained to the staff that I wasn't helping him with his English. He claimed he was doing as I instructed: asking questions. One more complaint against me. Management kept count. "Do you have any questions?" "Do you have any questions?" "Do you have any questions?" Again and again I have asked that question over the last eleven years. A few students get it. Most don't. Most panic, or get confused, and so I explain the cultural conventions once again, even give examples of different responses. Some pick it up, some continue to freak out: laugh, giggle, stare, squirm, sweat, leaf furiously through notebooks, panic. "Do you have any questions, Junichiro?" "Hai. Do you like rain?" "Why do you ask?" Sweat poured down his sunken cheeks, and in his stress-ravaged face, I could see the gears of another student's question-and-response machinery being to slip and grind, as yet another personal universe of limited-thinking-set-responses began to implode. Fun, ain't it? |
| Occasionally, the gods might smile on an MOVA teacher, and granted them their daily wish, that first thing they wish for when walking past the sliding glass doors into the temperature controlled, muzak permeated air of the school, wishing again as they put their bag away and then checking the day's teaching schedule: give me a no-show. At best, a no-show might mean having forty minutes to read the newspaper or catch up on some Japanese study. A no-show might mean being assigned an inane task such as folding flyers or stamping the school's address onto a brochure. A no-show might mean being handed an ancient sponge and being told to clean the toilet, all the while hearing that tiny voice in your head: but I'm a teacher, damn it. A no-show might mean writing counseling reports for students, reports containing "no fewer than 5 good points, and no more than 4 bad points." A no show might mean flirting with that hot new staff member. A no-show might even mean all of the above--or none of them. But one thing you were certain of: a no-show meant no insanity for forty minutes. Unless, of course, some student just happened to walk into the school and "luckily" found your lesson time available. Well, today, dear reader, you've been given a no show. That's right: the devil and I are too busy to remember a student today. We're teaching from 9:30 a.m. until 9:30 p.m., plus doing housework, revising a short story, writing test questions for a finance test, and finishing the last two chapters on a textbook for English learners. You have a no-show. Make the best of it. |
| "Do you believe in evolution?" She's small and soft looking, dressed in clean, middle-class clothes of various pastel hues--the spitting image of the kindly grandmother, in no way possibly offensive. I'd been warned about her, though: our resident Japanese Jehovah's Witness. "Which version of evolution do you mean?" I asked politely. She cocked her head. "What?" "Well, do you mean the theory set out by Darwin in his books, or the more modern ones based on Darwin's work but refined by 150 years of study and observation?" "They're the same. Evolution." She smiled warmly, disarmingly so. "Saying human came from monkey. You can't believe that." "I don't." Her smiled stretched out like an earthworm in the sun. "Don't get me wrong," I explained. "I don't believe humans evolved from monkeys." [Please note the correction by altered repetition] "What do you believe?" "Have you read Darwin's work?" I don't ask Have you bothered to read Darwin's work? because, after having grown up in American, after countless encounters with evangelical bible-thumpers, I know such people do not read works which challenge their beliefs. I, however, have read the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, twice, trying things on for size. "No." "I have. I've read The Origin of Species a couple of time, and nowhere in there does he say humans descended from monkeys." "Oh? I thought he did. You are lying?" Dear reader: We ESL teachers in Japan are not supposed to disagree with students. Disagreeing might make them uncomfortable, unhappy, and therefore unlikely to buy more lesson points. Just another example of how dense I am. "No. He says, at the end of the last chapter, that perhaps evidence of human descent from some ape-like creature might be found in Africa." "Ape, monkey: what's the difference?" "The differences are huge, actually. And modern biological anthropologists all agree that we didn't descend from apes, either. We share a common ancestor with apes, is all. We and apes evolved from the same type of creature millions of years ago. But we are not descended from apes--and certainly not from monkeys." "And you believe that?" "I'm not sure belief has anything to do with it. I've looked, as best as I can, at the evidence, at the arguments, and I've done my reading. I don't see anything wrong with what all of these scientists are proposing: it makes sense to me. Much more sense than believing the world started with just two humans." "Don't you believe in God?" "I haven't experienced anything to make me wonder if God exists, no." "But I thought you were American?" That ended our class for one evening. Weeks later, she returned. The staff told me she'd requested me as a teacher. I could say this about her, though: her English was good enough to follow and engage in almost any discussion. And she never did seem to tire of trying. She smiled as I sat down, then leaned forward and, still smiling, sotto voice, asked: "Do you believe murdering baby is good?" That shocked me, and I don't shock easily. Murder is an uncomfortable topic in Japan; abortion, while common, is a taboo topic. Watching the question come out of the cardigan-wearing grandmotherly face was just plain creepy, like being savaged by a toy poodle. "Um. What?" She checked a word in her notebook. "Abortion," she said, looking up. "Do you believe murder baby is good?" I sat back and checked around the school: the nearest students were in another classroom around the corner, and the staff, all two of them, were busy on the telephones, well out of earshot. Little chance we would be overhead, though it didn't seem she cared. "OK. Well,"I said, stalling to gather my thoughts. "To start with, there's a lot of assumptions in that question, which makes it pretty impossible for me to answer." "Assumptions?" "Yes. For one thing, you want me to agree that abortion is murder, and murder, by definition, is a crime of killing someone by plan. When there's no law against abortion, there's no crime in performing an abortion." "You are just being clever. You know what I mean." "Actually, I do. But I don't think you know what you mean. Maybe we shouldn't talk about this." "Why? You have abortion in America, yes? Baby killing," she said, warming up for one of her rants. "Those are babies they are killing, you know. Who knows what they could've grown up to be? Maybe we've killed someone who would've made the cure for cancer. Maybe we killed Jesus, did you ever think of that?" "Yes, I have. Maybe we stopped the next Hitler from being born." I was getting angry, which is why I suggested changing the subject. However, dense as I am, I don't listen to myself much either. Liar. "What?" she asked. "Well, what bothers me is that people against abortion always argue that the fetus might have developed into something good; they never seem to argue it could've just as easily--in fact more likely--developed into some evil-minded sod bent on destruction." "Well, obviously, you think abortion is good because you believe in evolution." "Ma'am," I said, taking a breath to control myself, "I don't think abortion is good--or bad. I think women, all women, should have the choice of what to do with their bodies; men do at any rate." "People believing evolution think humans are animals, so killing animal is okay, yes?" "I think the simple fact that an animal evolved into such a creature as ourselves and hasn't given up in despair is pretty amazing actually. Anyway, you kill mosquitoes, right?" "Yes." "So killing is okay?" "No." "Cancer: good or bad?" "Bad." "Kill cancer: good?" "Good, yes." "The world isn't black and white: you, a Japanese person, should know that." "What would you know of abortion," she asked, clearly losing her patience. "You are a man, and you are not Christian." "OK," I said, calling an end to it. "We should change subjects." We still had twenty minutes of class time left, and I had not idea what we could possibly move on to, but wanted to get there as soon as possible. "No. I want to talk about this. This is my time. I paid for it. You are a man and you don't believe in God. You believe in evolution. How can you understand that abortion is evil?" "By having grown up Catholic," I said, leaning forward, red in the face. "And, when I was twelve, they sat all of us kids from the church down in the rectory for an afternoon of TV, movies and presentations. All our parents signed forms saying it was okay. And you know what they showed us? It wasn't cartoons, I'll tell you that right now. "Ultrasounds of abortions being performed, so that we, children maybe six to thirteen years old, could see them struggle and open their mouths in silent alarm. Piles of the arms and the legs of aborted fetuses. Wonderful diagrams of how the doctor cut the bodies apart in the womb. Lectures on how all of this was evil and how we, children of the Church, were expected to grow up and fight this evil scourge if we wanted to get into Heaven. Again and again they hammered that message home over the hours we were shut in there. A few kids cried, yes, but most of them just sat there open-eyed, taking it all in, trusting their elders. It sunk in deep, let me tell you. “That’s where I got the seed to ask the question of what was evil, and it starting by understanding that intentionally treating living children—the children you profess to care for—in such a way, brainwashing them before they have a chance to hear as many sides to the story as possible before forming their own opinions, is evil. I walked away from the Church that afternoon, and never returned.” “So, you believe abortion is okay.” “I believe that if you believe you are right, with no chance of being persuaded you might not be, then there really is nothing for us to argue about. And look at that: we’re almost out of time. What are you going to do tonight after the lesson?” “I will go home and cook dinner.” “What’s for dinner?” “Oden and salad.” “Sounds good. I love oden.” “My husband does, too. It is good winter food.” “It certainly is. Good night.” “Good night.” |
| She was petite, well-dressed, and laughed nervously after every sentence. In her mid-forties, she was single and lived with her parents. "Good evening." "Good evening." Giggle giggle, huff huff. She always took lessons at night after work. "How was work today?" "It was so-so." Giggle giggle, huff huff. She ran a small lingerie store in a local shopping center. She as never busy. In her personal life, there was never much to report. She traveled abroad one every couple of years, studied English in her free time, and watched TV. She loved Korean dramas, especially "Winter Sonata," and had a huge crush on the Korean actor Peyon Ju (I think that's his name). When meeting other students for the first time, she always introduced herself as working at a lingerie store. The female students found this mildly interesting, and the male students either blushed or got a little excited--Japanese men, I have been told, never step inside a lingerie store, because it is very uncommon for men to buy women lingerie. I thought at first that she was just saying it to get attention, and then I thought maybe she just wasn't embarrassed by it. In the end, after years of conversations together, I realized it was just about the most interesting thing in her life. Not that working at a lingerie store is typically that exciting, especially in a small city such as this one. It's just that, aside from watching TV and studying English, she had nothing else going on in her life. She was "arafo," or "around forty," unmarried and, given her looks, demeanor, and age (tied up as it is with the Japanese penchant for, what shall I say, "young" girls?) unlikely to find a husband soon. "Where do you work?" a student would ask her. "I work at a lingerie store." Giggle giggle, huff huff. Her pronunciation was about as good as most of the other students', so please understand that "lingerie" usually sounded like "laundry". "You sell machines?" some would follow up. "You are a housewife?" others might ask, thinking she'd meant "I do laundry." "No, I sell lingerie." Giggle giggle, huff huff "Do you like it?" the quicker ones might ask. "Yes," she would say, "but sometimes I don't." And here she would lose that nervous laugh and become serious. "Why?" the less cautious among our students would venture. "The men." And here all interest in her job would cease. I, not being Japanese, couldn't understand why, at first. Illiterate as I tend to when attempting to "reading the air," I eventually pressed her to explain. Remember, I said Japanese men do not typically buy women lingerie? Well, that doesn't mean some of them don't buy women's lingerie. There's a fine but significant distinction. And they would want to use her changing room. Perhaps they even asked her opinion, but probably they were just too shy. Hey, this is Japan, where the customer is king, and the customs of Japanese customer service forbid the salesperson from making a any customer feel anything but welcome. My guess is she'd been dealing with such men for at least fifteen years, and every night she would go home, watch TV, live with her parents, and, whether by choice or not, stay single. |
| Back in my first months of teaching—back when I was still reeling from divorce, drinking heavily and smoking two packs a day, when I was, basically, a walking erection filled to bursting with bitterness and addicted to self pity —I met Nou. Oh, Nou... You were tall, slender, pale skinned, with a waterfall of straight, jet black hair flowing down each side of your head; cool, reserved, and utterly mirthless; in better circumstances, you should have been one of Dracula’s concubines. Instead, you headed the Japanese branch of Marilyn Manson’s fan club, and boasted of having partied twice with him on his stops here. That understood, it’s kind of funny that whenever I sat down across from you, two utterly inappropriate things wrestled for dominance of the forefront of my mind. One was the song “Kitty” by the Presidents of the United States of America: “He needs some pettin’ and lovin’ on his hide / Oh kitty, won’t you come inside…Pussy purrin’ and lookin’ so satisfied.” The other was SEX! Oh God! Please, you incredible piece of work, with that body looking like it’s been lathed from a single, flawless piece of ash, indicate, if you would be so kind, by word, action or deed, some mutual desire to rut with me. “How are you today?” the more socially astute part of me inquired. “I’m okay. A little tired.” Your English was pretty good, and it was easy to talk to you--largely because you weren't afraid of making mistakes, and you avoided stock replies whenever you felt like it. Looking back, I see how much you looked like that character Gogo Yubari from “Kill Bill” (though this was years earlier) in the bar scene where she disembowels a perv, your mouth making such polite, seemingly personable replies, while your cool eyes whispered, “Do you still wish to penetrate me?... Or is it I who has penetrated you?” You stuck out like a sore thumb, a kind of hang-over from the heyday of this town wasn’t considered “countryside,” when everyone was rich and care free, and you exuded such confidence and a sense that while you knew perfectly well everyone’s eyes were on you, you weren't going to be bothered to worry about. You worked as a hostess at one of the local, upper-priced stands, usually finishing work around three in the morning, after hours of making men feel good about themselves. By all accounts, you excelled at your job. You must have understood male psychology very, very well. “How was work last night?” Please, dear lady, tell me you wouldn’t be averse to stripping off these clothes and going at it like weasels in winter. Little bag a bones been out all night / Can you hear him scratchin’ at the screen door? You never smiled—at least not at me, despite my best efforts to keep things light yet professional between us. Could it have been the thoughts blazoned across the inside of my forehead? You had a pink t-shirt with a big kiss mark on it you sometimes wore, with these words in gold across the mounds of your perfectly pert, little breasts: “It’s your girlfriend I’m aiming at.” Kitty at my foot and I wanna touch it / Kitty rear up and scratch me through my jeans What did we talk about? You know, I can honestly and unashamedly say I don’t remember. Are you surprised by that? I doubt it. I’m sure we talked about those everyday things everyone else seems to chatter over: work, hobbies, music, travel, family, and other such mundane mendacities that lay a civilized veneer over those less appropriate, more heated--more living thoughts screaming withing their bounds. Or is that just me? You know the answer to that. Meow meow meow meow meow meow |
| Late 70’s, pushing 80, with a face wrinkled like a cheerful raisin, Kuniko kept her graying hair short, her clothes simple, and her conversations off serious matters. One morning, she told me how she still had nightmares, remembering how Russian soldiers with "angry faces" had burst through the door of her family’s home in China at the end of WWII. It took me a while to realize that she wasn’t admitting she was secretly Chinese. Instead, her family had been one of those hundreds of Japanese families who’d colonized mainland China. She’d been a little girl, maybe six years-old, when with a crack and a spray of splinters her family discovered they’d been on the wrong side of the war. It had taken some months to get all those Japanese living abroad back to the main islands, and then, usually, only by leaving everything behind. I'm not sure what the child Kuniko had left behind. The following 70-odd years in Japan had taught her that while some form of security could be had in stability, that didn’t ensure happiness. Her and her husband had been childless, despite years of efforts. She’d grown old watching her neighbors’ houses fill with the laughter and cries of children and grandchildren. She'd been the dutiful housewife, and didn't regret being a partner to her husband, but regretted never having pursued a career. She always wore a quiet smile. She adopted every teacher she met: gave them gifts, worried over their health and happiness, checked they were eating right. If they weren’t eating right, or if they were feeling sick, she brought them vegetables or fruits, and medicines. At heart, she was still a little girl, and we were all chicks she’d found fallen out of their nest, needing care and attention. Some of her gifts could be quite expensive—so expensive, in fact, the teachers became uncomfortable and asked the staff to talk to her about the need to keep some distance between teachers and students. She reacted to the rebuff with some reluctance, toning down the gifts, or at least not letting us know the prices. She gave me a set of four hand-made, hand-sized bean bags. They were beautiful: soft, brightly colored with Japanese prints, and perfect for juggling (I’d been using some plastic balls up until then): I’d told her how it made my infant son laugh to juggle over his head. One week later, she put the bags in my hand and, pressing my fingers closed around them, told me to love my son with all my heart. Soon after, she and her husband bought a kitten, a Russian Blue, despite their misgivings about clawed furniture and sprayed walls. By all accounts, her husband was kind and devoted, and, once he’d retired, even helped with the housework and was trying to learn some basic cooking. We talked about housework a lot. She told me the secrets of keeping the bath area free of mold ("wash with cold water"), and how to clean the lights, the screens, the windows, the walls and tatami for New Years. Our conversations were fun for the most part, though that devil did crop up from time to time, called by Kuniko's inability to discern between past and present tense. After five years of weekly chats, she began to come less often. Her health was failing, and she lacked the energy to make it into the school as often as she once had. Money was getting tighter, too, what with pensions being reduced and prices rising, and she and her husband were making cutbacks. Then, in 2007, the company closed its doors, suddenly, without any warning, though many hints were in the air, taking every students' money with it into bankruptcy. I've seen many of my former students in the months and years since then, but I haven't seen or heard word of Kuniko. Of course, we never had the chance to say goodbye to one another. I've never regretted the closing of that school (how could I, given I work for the "new and improved" version, and hated almost every day I worked there?), but I do sometimes recall what, and who, we left behind. |
| Some people have nervous habits when they talk: some tap their feet, some play with their hair, some scratch at their forearm until the skin is raw and blood threatens to weal. Some people have nervous twitches: muscles that spasm in their face, causing them to wink frenetically or to flash a sneer so quick it puts you in mind of a lizard scuttling across a hot rock. Some breathe through their nose in place of laughter, afraid no one else will get the joke. (That’s me, don’t you see?) Some hum supermarket tunes. This guy’s hand twitched. Always in the form of a grasping, half-clenched claw, it jutted out in front of him as he sat across the table, twitching side to side, slicing a half circle out of the air. Twitch twitch. Twitch twitch. Time and again, my eyes would be drawn from his face by the twitching of his hand, like I had no better than a kitten’s attention span, and no more self-control than a dog snapping at the mail man. Which isn’t to say he was boring. On the contrary, he was one of the more interesting students to talk to on Sunday mornings, especially if you had a hangover, because he loved to talk about drinking, as he seemed to partake of that bitter pill as often as not. He was a mid-level student, a level 5, though he’d only started studying English a month and a half before. But try as I might to keep my attention on his face as he talked, that twitching hand drew my eyes down again. He was a fire fighter by trade, with all the title implies: dark-skinned, muscular, macho. Though married with two children, he unashamedly admitted in lessons that he’d visit a soap land (i.e., sex bath) three or four times a year. Twitch twitch. Twitch twitch. What the hell was with that, anyway? I finally figured it out, once I discovered his reason for studying English. Unlike most students, he wasn’t interested in talking to people from other countries, in traveling abroad, in foreign movies or TV shows, and he certainly had no use for English at work. He was interested in one thing, and one thing only (his sexual exploits aside): pachinko. Pachinko, if you don’t know, is a type of vertical pinball, and you’ll find pachinko parlors everywhere throughout Japan, even in the smallest, poorest town. Officially, it is not gambling, BUT players pay money to play, have the chance to win increasingly large or valuable prizes which they can then exchange for money at a small window just outside the shop. So, yes, it is gambling, but almost everyone in Japan swears there is no gambling in Japan. People get addicted, some severely so. When I first arrived in Japan, there were posters up outside every parlor, with the sad face of a child huge upon them, reminding parents not to leave their children in the car while they played pachinko—turns out some forgotten children had died of heatstroke or dehydration that way. To play pachinko, you sit on a stool in front of the machine, and you turn a dial in a half-circle. This releases the balls, which fall down through various obstacles and hopefully into the right holes. You continue to hold the dial in this position until you run out of balls, which might never happen if you keep plugging money in. Our fire fighter seems to have been doing it too much, for too long, and was trying a new way to combat his addiction. “I study English,” he said, “so I don’t play pachinko.” |
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