Another Awkward Exchange

Today I covered for a teacher who had a death in the family.  After lunch I sat in the staff room reading when a tall, graying teacher approached me. 

“What’s your name?”

“Guaria-sensei.”  I showed him the name tag hanging around my beck. 

“What’s your name?”

“Tajima. I’m Tajima.”

“Tajima-sensei?”

“Yes.”

“You are very tall.” 

“Yes.”

“Are you basketball player?”

“No, my sport is swimming.”

“Okay!”  With that he turned and walked away. Another awkward conversation, I think to myself.  But, honestly, I don’t mind too much, because I’ve had so few social interactions in the last two months, that I’ll even welcome a few odd exchanges. 

Kyoto-sensei, who heard us, looks up and says, “He’s our school principal.” 

“He’s the kocho-sensei?”  I can’t even hide my surprise.

“Yes.” 

Okay, then.

06/2020 

Sasquatch Shops for Socks

After the lunchtime dance class I dropped by the park near my place.  A bunch of vendors line up their bongo trucks on one side of the park and ply their wares.  They sell everything from tools to clothing to kitchen utensils.  I’d only gone to browse, but when I saw the sock truck, I remembered that I needed socks for the upcoming cooler weather.   The grandmotherly vendor smiled and encouraged me to look through the boxes of socks she had set out on folding tables.  

I was drawn to one box which held cutesy styles.  The halmony came over, looked down at my size 41 skippies, gently took my elbow and led me over the table with men’s socks.  She was so smooth with it that I chuckled to myself.   I’m not much of a girly girl, but once in a while I like a bit of color on my feet.  The men’s boxes only contained black, grey, brown and navy.    I bought two pairs of black socks that I could wear with my work trousers.  When the vendor was bagging my purchase, she threw in a pair of black footsies.  “Service,” she said, which to Koreans means complimentary or freebie.  I guess it was to ease the sting of wordlessly telling me that my feet were too big for the feminine socks.  

October 2012

Disabled Beggars

I hate to see disabled people begging.  Everyone can do something to earn a living.  Begging is lazy and removes one’s dignity.  2014

I wrote the above when I began to notice people who were blind or deaf begging on trains.  Or lame men dragging themselves on makeshift skateboards at the farmer’s market begging for money.  I now realize that I was looking at things with very Western eyes.  To many in Korea, having a disabled child is considered shameful, so most of these babies end up in orphanages.  In fact, I read that the vast majority of children in the country’s many orphanages have at least one living parent.  Aside from disabled children, orphanages are full of able bodied children who simply had the misfortune of being born inconvenient.   

Most orphanages just house, feed, clothe children and send them to school.  Once they come of age, they’re on their own with no skills to help them survive out in the world.  Since students are tracked very early on, university is just a dream for a child without parents to push and encourage them.  And in Korea, many job applications ask for what amounts to a brief genealogy.  Since orphans are stigmatized by society, once an employer sees their application, they don’t even have a chance at getting an interview.  Moon Jae-in, the current president, is working to stop the practice of requiring applicants’ family histories as well as photos.  If able bodied people who grow up without parents have it so difficult, imagine a person with a disability who never got any sort of skills training.  At least some able bodied orphans manage to eke out a living doing odd jobs of unskilled labor.  

In the U.S. I have a friend who is blind who has held several jobs.  His first job was loading dishwashers in a restaurant.  When we met he sewed duffel bags for a company subcontracted by the military.  He lives in his own apartment, pays all his bills and doesn’t rely on any type of charity.  Of course, this is because he was able to get job training which helped make him employable.  People can do as much as they are able if they have the right support.  That concept is very new here.  In fact, Koreans are shocked that people with disabilities even marry and have families of their own in the West. 

Things are changing slowly.  Once in a while a see a woman out with her visibly disabled child, which means that some families are keeping their disabled children.  Not an easy feat in a society that still has far to go in their attitudes and way of thinking toward such people.  

I now understand that, in most cases, begging is not lazy.  It’s often the only means of survival in a place that doesn’t afford any chances to people who are different.

The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered Down

Ai-chan tries really hard in school. She does well too. While most girls at the junior high school wear their hair in ponytails or short bobs she wears hers in two thick braids. Eight months into my time in Gunma, she started missing school. Through the other teachers’ bizarre explanations, I came to realize that she was suffering from anxiety and depression (“She doesn’t want to get out of bed. She cries too much at home. She afraid to go outside.”). I prayed that her parents could find qualified people to help her through this. In many ways, the field of psychiatry is still in its infancy in Japan because general attitudes toward mental health issues are stuck in the 1940s.

By the time I left Gunma, she had just started coming back to school a few days per week. Most Japanese people don’t understand mental illness and treat it like weakness of character or lack of willpower. Therefore, some of her teachers saw her absenteeism as bothersome. Whenever I saw her, I always greeted her and told her that I was happy to see her. Apparently this meant a lot to her and she wrote me a letter saying so.

She is also a Jehovah’s Witness in a school full of non-religious or barely Buddhist people, so that also added to her reputation as a wierdo. One teacher said, “Her family goes to church three or four times every week. Can you believe it??” I told him, yes, I can. Jehovah’s Witnesses are common in the West and I’ve had JW classmates, friends and colleagues. He was shocked. He thought they were rare. 

Many Japanese traditions are rooted in Shintoism and/or Buddhism, so when there were school events she couldn’t participate in for religious reasons, I’d keep her company. It was just the decent thing to do. I didn’t want her to feel ostracized or punished for being different (which, in the land where conformity is king, it is the modus operandi).  

An often-repeated Japanese proverb says that “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down…” That’s all well and good if you’re literally referring to nails, but people aren’t nails and diversity shouldn’t be punished. Especially when it’s things outside of our control.  

December 27, 2019

双生児

There’s a tall, bespectacled sixth grader who never speaks English in class. During the ten-minute breaks between periods or during recess time, he comes and hangs out in the English classroom. He asks me a million questions that I can’t answer because they’re all in rapid-fire Japanese. He’s walks around the room scrutinizing every poster and bulletin board as if seeing them for the first time.  Then, if I’m not near the desk, he touches the computer. He’s annoying, but I tolerate him because I suspect that he doesn’t go to recess because nobody will play with the socially awkward kid. Being different in a society that values uniformity can be excruciating for a child, so I always try to look out for the odd ones.

Earlier this month, on a particularly hectic Tuesday, I felt like he’d come in at every single period break. So I kicked him out. I felt bad, but I really needed a few child-free minutes to regroup that day. Then the last period of the day, his homeroom came for their lesson. I was confused. Hadn’t I already taught him in the morning? Or was it because he had come during all the breaks? I greeted him and checked to see if he was upset that I’d thrown him out earlier. He seemed fine. But he sat in the center back. Didn’t he usually sit in the back near the door? And wasn’t he wearing a burgundy sweat shirt earlier? He was wearing a green one now. What is going on? Am I going nuts?

The next week I paid special attention to him and discovered that both of the sixth grade homerooms have one of him. It had taken me almost four months to realize that I was teaching identical twins! The reason why I felt like they were always in my room is because they were taking turns hanging out.  

********** 

There are also identical twin fifth-graders, but I figured that one out earlier because one is very sensitive (he cried when he got an answer wrong) while the other is more outgoing and let’s things roll off his back. I figured it had to be twins or a kid with a personality disorder.