After my day of rest, I sprung out of bed at 5 in the morning to beat the sun to the sunrise. I raced down to the riverbank to see if I could catch the fishermen I missed yesterday at their work.
I was a bit early, so I wound up padding around town having a look at things while everyone was still asleep. There were a few rice farmers up and at it, and a couple of people walking dogs, or riding bikes, but it was still the early sleepy hours of the morning, where you don't speak - you just exchange glances with people that pass you by, as though to say "Oh, you're awake too."
After seeing some of the town, I headed back to Lindsay's to wait for news on today's field trip. I really wanted to see inside a Japanese school, and she was at work asking if it'd be okay to take me around. I caught a message from her almost immediately saying that not only would it be okay, but she was on her way to pick me up right away! I ate an apple yogurt and cleaned my lens.
Lindsay knocked, and we hopped into her friend Serena's car to check out some schools! Serena is also a JET, and the only other native english speaker in Lindsay's town. This makes for a lonely existence, as the only other English speaking person is a Japanese teacher who'd lived a year in Australia, so while her English is good, it's not always up to stimulating conversation level.
Katakana reads: Se-ri-na
Serena's from the US, and makes an interesting counterpart to Lindsay. Where Lindsay is full of blinding enthusiasm, Serena is blase, but amused. Where Lindsay is ready to speak to a student, but can't find the words, Serena is ready, but not eager to respond on her behalf. But Serena is full of joy when she gets a student to reply in English, or to approach of his/her own accord, or when they'll open up about something moderately personal. She's very interesting. Between the two of them, I got an excellent tour, as we climbed 300 feet of steps to a school at the top of a hill (which incedentally, is an evac point in case of flooding).
It's summer, so school's not in at the moment, and I of course imagined that meant it was to be more of a tour of the facilities...but that's not the case in Japan. In summer, you join a club - well, all year you're part of clubs, but they continue in the summer, and it's mandatory - and you arrive at school every day...sometimes even saturdays...and participate in your club to the best of your ability. If you join baseball, and it's 42 degrees out...you play baseball in full uniform all day as hard as you can. It's just what you do.
Kids who aren't part of clubs (for example, maybe they're too young for them) tend to head to school anyway, because there's not really anything to do in town. They'll hang out with each other, hang out with the kids before and after their clubs, and even hang out with the teachers. It seems very peer-to-peer in the summer months, which I found pretty interesting.
All the kids had a chuckle at me, I assumed because I was a foreigner. I found out later that for a lot of the kids, I was the first white male they'd ever seen in the flesh. This is a really, really small town, and Lindsay and Serena are the only two foreigners most of these kids have ever dealt with. There aren't really any non-Japanese males in their lives. So apparently I was of some interest. This made a lot of kids quite shy, and made some of the braver ones a little inquisitive. Unfortunately, I tended to get the same questions over and over.
One thing that confuses me a lot is the way gossip is treated here. All small towns are full of it, but Japanese culture has some odd rules. There are work parties Lindsay and Serena attend, called Enkais. There's also a ni-enkai (read: afterparty) and even sometimes, san-enkai (read: after-afterparty). Things can get pretty out of hand at the san-enkais, in details I won't go into here, but apparently, even though you're with everyone you work with - it's never talked about. If something goes on at the after-afterparty, and the teachers, the principal, and everyone in between sees it go down...no one will ever say a thing. And yet - every single student, every teacher, and even complete strangers would approach Lindsay in the street to ask if I was her boyfriend, or husband - which seems the complete opposite of that attitude. There's an awful saying in Japan - "Girls are like Christmas cake...you wouldn't want Christmas cake after the 25th." There's tremendous pressure to be married before 25, happy wedding, happy life. But it creates a tremendous amount of tension, anxiety, and really subjugates the whole female gender by feeding them one pressing concern. It's really horrible. And that's what I believe creates this unique strain of gossip...inquiring into someone's relationship status isn't rude, because it's presented almost as an inquiry into your safety or well-being. Like asking if you're better after you've had a cold. It's a little frightening, and makes for a lot of awkwardness.
Apart from that, all my student interactions were quite cool. Most of them were pretty enthused, and liked to talk about what they were doing at school in the summer months. In the lunchroom, we stumbled in to an amazing scene that really reminded me kids are the same everywhere.
Slumped over, facefirst on a desk was a man I learned from Lindsay is a teacher, and the basketball coach. The kids were all stuffing their faces with school lunch, and pointing and laughing maniacally at the sleeping instructor. As we approached, we realized this was because they'd managed to cover his entire back in little orange stickers. It was just hilarious. He woke up as we were there, and sluggishly tried to brush off his back as best he could. He explained he'd been up 'till all hours of the night watching Olympic Judo, and didn't sleep much as a result. This just made the kids laugh harder. It was a wonderful caricature of a scene I was really excited to get to witness. It's just how I'd imagined it.
Another wonderful thing happened while we were at school. We went upstairs to check out music club, and the students were all just warming up with a new piece they were working on. The teacher told us they'd been at it about 45 minutes, and weren't due to try playing it together for at least a few hours more. Since we were there, however...they were going to give it a try anyway. Ever accommodating.
Considering they had almost no experience with this piece, and most were reading as they went, it was a pretty unbelievable performance. It really blew me away. It was equal parts Japanese traditional melody and marching band blare, and I liked it right away. The discipline and the effort of these people never ceases to amaze me, nor does their eagerness to please. It's totally unparalleled, an integral part of their cultural identity, and something they can safely call their own.
We toured around two schools that afternoon, since apparently there's literally nothing for the JETs to do in the summer months, and the folks who do have things to do don't bother to dole it out. It's odd. We spoke a little bit at the second school to the only other English speaker in town, and heard a bit about what it was like staying sane during the summer.
Tsuno's three English speakers
We checked out a basketball practice in action, and saw the girls volleyball team warming up as well. I sat Lindsay down in a classroom to ask her a few questions about what Canada means to her, now that she's lived away from it for an entire year.
It was a really nice perspective to get, and fit in with the whole "What makes a good ambassador to Canada" question rather nicely.
After school, we headed back to Lindsay's place, only to be ambushed by a bunch of the youngins from the preschool and early early middle school - they were waiting outside Lindsay's apartment for her to return so she would come out and play.
We hung out outside Lindsay's house, skipping rope and trying to chat with these spry young kids. They didn't have much English, and I certainly don't have much Japanese, so mostly it was actions, gestures, and insistent pointing. I took a few photos, and then this girl started making demands.
Mostly by saying "Chk-chhshhh" (her best camera shutter sound) and then pointing at herself, or at her friend, or her brother. She eventually demanded that she take a photo of me.
She was a pretty cool kid.
After we'd sufficiently played, we decided to head up a different mountain, complete with waterfall, ancient japanese footbridge, and other amazing scenery.
At the top of this mountain is something I hadn't seen much of in Japan....Cows!
Again, as we crested the entrance to the sky, the clouds rolled in, only this time we wound up inside stormclouds. Dark and grey, everything was covered in a thick fog, and in spite of it being a reasonably sunny day, visibility was down to maybe 60 feet. We approached the mountaintop where the topography suddenly changed, and made things all the more surreal. Walking in the dead, flat silence through the thick, gray fog of a cloudbank, out of the dense forest and onto a sparse, rocky plain...it was like leaving for another world. The silence was deafening...I felt like I could hear each cow breathing.
They were curious about us, but erred on the side of caution, taking a few steps away as I approached with my camera through the gloom. They were all done up in traditional style, with a ring through the nose and a rope 'round the ears, to make them easy to handle for the farmers. Once they realized I was just there to have a look...they relaxed.
It's more like being inside a damp cave with soft walls...walls you can never reach. They're perpetually just out of range, as though the cave moves with you as you pass between the clouds' borders. It's quiet, but there's constant motion all around you, as the walls and ceiling rush silently from one side to the other. It's damp, like you could taste the air, but the rain is happening someplace far, far away.
It was really neat.
We came down the mountain and out of the clouds, and for the second time in as many days, I returned to earth. We got ourselves a little lost driving down the mountain, but we weren't really in a hurry. We listened to music, drove around, watched the moon come up over the edge of the mountains, as we wound and twisted our way back into Tsuno.
Tomorrow, I would visit the youngest of them all - the preschoolers. Lindsay's turn at the preschool was slated to be tomorrow, so I got some sleep, ready to deal with the relentless energy of tiny children first thing in the morning.
Dreams...some you have, and some you live.
-Jeff
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