Four Hundred Days Til Re-entry

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

posted by Between daisies @ 17:38