The cultural festivities this week have been based around....
.... The Hot Supporter
When I first heard tell of the Hot Supporter I immediately thought of some kind of revolutionary underwear, possibly for women with droopy breasts or even men with droopy testicles. I couldn't imagine why the school would be getting one. So then I reasoned that it might be part of some kind of push to get more kids to go and watch live football or something like that. The Football Association is sending supporters to espouse the wonders of watching football of a Saturday (In my opinion, the wonder is that anyone at all pays to see Japanese football). A
hot supporter. At this point my mind took a leap sideways by about fifteen years to my childhood glimpses of page 3 girls in the Sun. Often a hot chick lifting a football shirt to show the barely literate her mammary glands.
It wasn't a football supporter either. In fact it was a guy sent by the local government to help the foreign kids deal with their problems at school. These problems often include no Japanese language ability whatsoever in the entire family. I have my suspicions that some of this is linked to their not being arsed with the Japanese education which is largely worthless outside Japan. This is only a suspicion based on hunches and little details so the jury must not let it influence their decision. In my opinion, though, a lot of these people are taking the piss. I cite one example of a boy who was off school three times in the same year for his own birthday. Putting him on the scale of one for human and two for ruling monarch, he could possibly be a demi-god but if so his parents have wisely decided to keep this fact to themselves. Just for the record, it is not the done thing to give your kids time off for their birthday(s).
My school has a moderate number of South American students, mostly from Brazil and Peru. Some of them speak Japanese better than me, while some of them arrive at school on their first day seemingly without the ability to say "konichiwa"or "arigato". Whilst I am aghast at this there is just a small amount, visible only by microscope with a big lens on a clear day, of respect for the sheer balls of this approach. Surely they knew they were going to be living in Japan? Is it possible to accidentally move house 14,000 kilometers and a good eighteen hours by plane on a whim. Or by accident? And make your way through the vile, dinosaur infested swamp that is Japanese immigration bureaucracy? "Oh, I'll just leave this inch thick wad of documents containing my entire family history on this desk here, shall I? Just while I tie my shoe lace again. Pablo, Pablo! Goddamnit, I've gone and lost the family documents again..."
As I said, we can assume that they knew they were coming. So now we will switch things round. This is you now. You are moving to an alien country with your family. Do you point them in the direction of the Japanese textbook or not? Just for the essentials: Good morning, a large beer please, where's the toilet, thank you.
So the local government decided to deal with this (muhahahahaha) not by telling the parents to get their shit together but by employing extra people to do all the work for them. Thus the idea of the Hot Supporter was born. Though where the name came from is anyones guess. So they set up a system where a guy comes in every week on Wednesday morning to interpret difficult stuff for the kids (stuff like science and history, maths looks the same in any language) and translate documents for the parents of these kids. This was supplementary to the woman that the school organised by themselves. Like I said in my last post, you need redundancy in schools to stop kids falling through the cracks. All well and good.
Fast forward through 'til about three quarters of the way through the year. The hot supporter is not here. We've gone from being hotly supported to being cold and dangly. Why? WHY?! Well, the guys at the local government got their sums wrong. The contract was for
x days. Reality had a contract that said
(x + quite a large number more) days. For once reality came out on top. So as a last minute stop-gap measure (the Japanese love these just a bit less than uniforms and pointless meetings), we got the Japanese Sean Connery.
Not Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice, where he is badly disguised as a Japanese person in a process that would later become known as valmorphanization. This guy is Sean Connery reborn before his death in Japanese form. How do I know? He turned up at work to fill in for the hot supporter until March. He's quite a jolly chap, with four languages at least and a brief and passing acquaintance with reality. Hilarious in his own way, which is highly taxing to busy school teachers.
He arrived at school this morning and, having been introduced to the head master the previous week and started the day in his office, let himself into the head master's office to continue the tradition. Having then handed his coat and hat to the deputy head he then proceeds to go round and introduce himself to all the people working in the staff room. The whole thing reminded me of a George Bernard Shaw play that I read last week called "Augustus does his bit". Well worth a read, by the way, and free for download from Project Gutenberg. There was something oh so very tragicomic about the whole thing. The ego, the three piece suit, the cologne, the faint falling of the face when he discerned that his desk was the one under the pile of posters and damaged books, it was all there. I asked him if he used to be in the police, but he said no. He used to work for an airline. It all fits.
In the end I, who am not known for it, took pity on the poor fool and took his mind of the earthly realities of the Elementary School. I buffed his celebrity a bit and chit-chatted about various things with him. I had the time free today because my classes were mostly off skiing (no invited again, damnit!). I distinctly remember him saying at one point that he "would try the school lunch to see if it agreed with him". Eventually the deputy head told him he was in danger of missing his train, which in Japanese conversational terms is like that big hook-thing they use at auditions. "Next"
After he had gone the deputy head thanked me for keeping him occupied. I asked her what she thought of him and she said he seemed alright. This wasn't the answer I was hoping for, so I said that he was very easy to talk to. She said it was fine so long as she didn't have work to do, so asked her if she wanted to discuss it. She looked like she was going to throw her rose hip tea at me until she realised I was joking.
Labels: George Bernard Shaw, hot, Japan, Japanese, school, supporter
The one day per year that makes it all worthwhile
I bitch and moan about Japan and it's education system, though the primary education system is very good, basically. Some days I feel like letting rip with an Uzi, but sometimes the good bits balance things out.
Today we had the second annual "Hinan Kunren". As many of you will know, social decline and the rule of the idiot-box over vast sections of the population have led to a lowering of the moral tone, to steal some words. People cannot tell helping old ladies with their shopping from parking in the disabled zone, right from wrong if you follow me. And now... our schools are no longer safe!
There was an incident, or even a series of incidents starting about five years back, in which a man basically entered a school and started damaging the students. The schools, local authorities and PTAs have brought in all manner measures to try and protect the safety of the kids. Each child has a rape alarm thing on his bag. Each teacher and PTA member has a sticker on their car or push-bike saying that they are on patrol. A series of elderly volunteers has been appointed and given day-glo coats and armbands (the Japanese love uniforms more than sushi, by the way), along with instructions to watch over the kids. Sorry, I meant The Kids.
Last year the Board of Education (BOE), in their wisdom, decided that we needed to have a drill to deal with "strange people coming into the school" to do unspecified "things" to or with the kids. Now we have three drills a year; A fire drill, an earthquake drill, a mentalist drill. The kids learn to walk calmly outside, get quietly under the table and quietly lock the doors and windows of the classroom. If this all seems a bit reactionary to you, then, well, it does to me too. Remeber, The Kids.
School started yesterday and the senior teacher gave me my timetable for this term. No lessons tomorrow because we're having a mentalist drill. No lessons was fine by me but it did strike me as a little bit odd. Perhaps the fruitcakes in Japan notify the schools in advance or something?
Up until about lunchtime I designed endless piles of worksheets and handouts. Over lunch they showed a video saying what you should do if someone strange enters the classroom (apart from the teachers and students). Then they gave specific instructions as to what was going to happen. A police man disguised as a mentalist was going to come into the school and do something unspecified to 6 - 3 (yes, they did actually say which class was going to be targeted). The student nearest the door and the one from the next class over were nominated to come and tell us in the staff room what was going on while the nearest teachers tried to contain the problem.
Most schools now have a special capture device, a kind of long metal stick with a semi-circular bit in the end to capture the baddie in. One of the other teachers dibbed this, so my weapon of choice was an aluminium stepladder. We agreed that he would go high and I would go low. Then we sat at our desks pretending to work with the adrenaline going round. The copper slipped out of a door and the uniformed one walked out with a clipboard. Then we laughed when he came back and asked if the nutter-copper was allowed in in his outside shoes. The Japanese police crack me up, they really do. Then the waiting game began.
The headmaster came out with a bokken, a wooden practice sword that I used to use when I did Aikido, and a kind of manic grin on his face. He used the remaining three minutes to pose with it on his hip like a katana and edge closer to the door so that he could be first on the scene. I don't know what he thought he was going to do with it because a wooden sword is fairly useless unless you want to seriously fuck someone up. I kept quiet though.
Anyway, the kids turned-up shouting and the headmaster bolted like shit off a shovel. I ran for my ladder and then ran along with the guy with the capture device. Down the corridor, left past the changing rooms towards 6-3 and there he was in the corridor surrounded by about three teachers. We charged in (litterally), me with my step-ladder and the other guy with his pitch-fork thing. "If you don't practice properly you won't be able to do it properly on the day" is a bit of a motto of mine, so I put a fair bit of weight behind it and we pinned him to the wall.
The guy, who had a fake knife in his hand, said, "OK, I'm captured." This was a bit of a poser because it was either a moderately un-cunning trick, or the copper saying he had had enough. He started to move, which settled it for me. I gave him a real hard jab with the ladder on his shins. "I'm captured," he said again.
The guy next to me said, "knife, knife."
I shouted, "DROP IT!" in Japanese and "Drop the fucking blade!" in English for a laugh. After he dropped the knife I settled the ladder in a stronger position.
"The ladder really hurts," said the copper.
"You're still breathing," I said with a shrug. Then a bunch of reinforcements came, mostly carrying brooms apart from my mate the nurse who had a ten inch hollow plastic hundred yen baseball bat. The copper with the clipboard, who I hadn't noticed up to this point off to the left, called things to a halt. Then a geriatric with an armband told us we had done it wrong and should have pulled out his legs with umbrellas. Hilarious. Especially when he tried to demonstrate the technique and failed.
I took my ladder back and joined the kids in the main hall. We endured thirty minutes of acronyms and advice from the geriatric, who it turns out was an ex-cop. That would be where the comedy aspect came from. At one point, I shit you not one bit, he taught the 1st years how to scream for help. "So that's how you do it," I said to the nearest teacher.
All that remained was the obligatory meeting. Japanese people like pointless meetings almost as much as uniforms. What was supposed to be a half hour postmortem became a soapbox for the geriatric ex-copper, who was newly retired and seemingly still hungry for power and attention. Luckily, I didn't have to attend. Word came through the grapevine that I had been very effective and the guy still remembered me from the year before when I smashed the knife out of his hand with a steel flagpole. Nice to be appreciated and all that.
So in all it was great fun. I got to hit the local filth with a ladder, which is the kind of opportunity that doesn't come along everyday. The exercise itself was a bit of a waste of time. Everyone knew exactly what was going to happen and when but in the case of some kind of real attack the school would be largely unprepared. My recommendation to anyone working at a school is to have ladders placed strategically around the school. With a ladder you can keep the assailant away from your body whilst smashing or crushing tender parts of your mentalist. As long as they don't have some kind of projectile weapon, like a gun...
Labels: copper, drill, Japan, Japanese, mentalist, police, school
Happy new year, world
A week away from the net and see how it all piles up...
December 27th - I spent most of the day driving south to make sure that I would be on time to meet M but I took a look at "folk village" (tourist trap) near my hotel:
December 28th - more driving, this time right the way to Sendai airport where I met M off the plane. I did stop off at Matsushima, though. It is one of the top three for something or other in japan.
December 28th to 30th - We went to Zao onsen where we enjoyed some good snow and smelly onsens. Seriously, the water had some kind of sulphur-compound in it that made it smell like rotten eggs.
December 31st - Off to Sendai in the morning. It emerged that that hotel we were staying at did have a car-park as it said but it wasn't included in the price. For a price selling itself on price this was a swindle. Not happy. Anyhow, we welcomed in the new year with Mexican food and Cuba Libres. Here is M modeling the latest in designer drink-wear.
January 1st 2007 - We went to a place called "Whale land" which I had assumed would be a whale watching spot. It turned out to be a museum about whales. First thing I saw on left as I came through the door was... canned whale meat. The whole building was a museum dedicated to the history of whale fishing. Not quite what I had been hoping for...
January 2nd - Another mammoth day of driving all the way to Kusatsu Onsen, where we stayed the night. About 400km this day. On the way we stopped-off in Nikko, a place famous for daringly criminal monkeys and old temples and shrines.
January 3rd - we carried on to Nozawa onsen, where we were planning to go boarding. Alas, the sun had other ideas and scuppered our plans by melting all the snow. At this point we decided to cut our losses and head home. At around 9pm on the 4th we arrived back at our flat, tired but satisfied.
Labels: Japan, nikko, nozawa onsen, Sendai, yamagata, zao
