Four Hundred Days Til Re-entry

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

posted by Between daisies @ 21:07