Little Gaijin Goes to School

This is the story of my trip to Japanese high school.

 I went with Cale today to the high school he teaches at in Iwami.  Let me paint a quick picture of the area here - it is not the metropolitan sprawl most commonly associated with Japan.  Tottori prefecture, where Cale lives and teaches, is the least populous prefecture in Japan.  It's rural and hilly and full of tiny communities that are far from ultramodern Japanese supercities.  Tottori is the largest city in its namesake prefecture, and it only has a population of a bit over 200,000.  Iwami is a twenty-minute train ride (provided horrible things don't happen, I'll get to that later) from Tottori, through really gorgeous verdant terrain, where bamboo and spills of wisteria dot the hillsides.  The mountains were all misty today, because it was pouring rain for the second day in a row, and stepping off the train into the little town of Iwami was a little like being in a Studio Ghibli movie.

For those of you who watch anime, forget at least half of what you thought you knew about Japanese high school- for those of you who don't, forget a lot of what you've heard about Japanese students.  As with most fictional portrayals, the scenery is right, and some of the major points are there, but they're missing large chunks.  First of all, this is not a fancy high school, and the kids here are not generally expected to be high achievers.  They're average to below average students, and they don't just sit respectfully in class and act studious.  They chat (a lot) and drag their feet about doing work, and basically fail to live up to stereotype.  Oh, and their uniforms do not in fact fit them like gloves and highlight all the girls' assets.  In point of fact, they're a bit bulky.

The school itself looks very much like what I've seen portrayed, in general, if a little more well-used.  But what I didn't know was that the obsession for different shoes is at almost a peak here.  You have to take off your outdoor shoes and put on indoor shoes.  For me, it was Skechers sandals, for the students, it's these clashy blue plastic sandals that look terribly uncomfortable.  Then, if you go into the gym, the shine on the floor is too sacred for even your indoor shoes (you do after all have to walk over some concrete to get there) and you have to take your shoes off entirely.  For classes, there are separate gym shoes; for assemblies, it's strictly socks.

The English teachers I met were all very nice and clearly hard-working, and gracious about having me there.  For the sake of Japanese propriety and convenience, I was introduced as Cale's cousin, and I became a special guest in the classes he worked with today.

Remember how I said Iwami is a small country town?  These kids are not used to foreigners (gaijin) at all.  Cale may have been the first foreigner many of them actually ever met, so I got a number of goggle-eyed stares just by virtue of looking very very un-Japanese.  A number of them found me cute, which was very gratifying, and they were very shy about speaking to me, and one girl looked like she just seized up and couldn't manage.  But we had a good time - the last class of the day had been asked to prepare questions for me, and so I tried to give very simple and American answers, rather than 100% honest answers which would be weird and confusing.  I couldn't quite manage to keep from a few weirdnesses when I didn't have a better response, because rather than pausing and thinking things through, my brain short-circuits and spouts the closest I can come up with.

So my regular American answers went something like this:

Q: What is your favorite type of cake?  A:  I like chocolate cake very much.
See?  Simple, easy answer for an English learner, even though my favorite cakes tend to have lavender or lemon zest or spice or other things that would require a lot of extra translation.

Or... Q: What kind of food do you like to eat?  A: I love Indian food.

But sometimes, they would ask questions where my options were to answer lamely or to fabricate, leading to some really weird things.

Q: What instrument do you play?

Brain goes:  Of course, they're going to just assume I play an instrument, because they all do.  Just like they're going to assume I play a sport, damn it.  I can't not play both sports and instruments.  Crap, what do I say?  I can play "Merrily We Roll Along" on the penny whistle.  I guess that'll do.

A: I used to play the tin whistle.  It's Irish.  I was not very good.  No, not like a clarinet.  No, not big.  Like a recorder?  You know?

As you can see, that's nothing like "I like chocolate cake."

According to my answers, I like to watch race cars and I watch basketball because so many of my friends play it, and I'm into the Albuquerque Isotopes baseball team, the only team I could remember, and I watch Desperate Housewives.  What can I say, I panic and spout off what I assume is digestible.

They were all very gracious to me, and it was interesting to see how students with very little exposure to foreigners in general, let alone Westerners, react.

As for the train ride home - all the students were sent home early because of the heavy rain, because trains would be running late, and that meant Cale and I were on the platform amongst most of the school.  For reasons unknown, the train that came along was one car.  So we packed like sardines onto one car with half of Cale's school, and that twenty-odd minute train ride slowed down because of weather and weight and became a sweltering, hour-long trip.

Despite that, a good day.