Sports day

It's been over a year now, marked by the passing of my second Sports day. Although it wasn't as completely new and alien as my first Sports Day was, just weeks after I arrived, it was still a fun experience, because we have nothing like it in America, besides old school Field Days and Pep rallies that arent really practiced anymore.

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Oh hey I just realized it's September 11th. Happy September 11th!

日焼け and three vials of blood

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Today's Japanese: Hiyake (日焼け), meaning sunburn

Yesterday was the "school excursion" which means we walked 2 1/2 hours into the mountains; to 'explodin'-with-nature' Akizuki, where I partook in most of my hanami a few weeks back. Now most of those cherry blossom trees have been blown bare by winds and rain, but the pale pink blossoms have been replaced by brilliant green leaves. However one species of cherry blossom remains in late bloom, the Kikuzakura (pictured left) whose larger flowers can have as many as a hundred petals on a single blossom.
(photo by Lillakanarie of flickr)

Having arrived in Akizuki, the students were filed into a field, where they played a quick batsu-maru game; a kind of true-or-false quiz game where one student with a megaphone asked a T or F question and all the other students went to one side of the field or the other to make their choice. Losers were eliminated to the sidelines until only a few students remained (it was clear that they were choosing together and would not be separated into individual winners and losers in order to determine the champion. The questions included kanji quizzes, the type of tree that is in front of the school, and knowing whether or not Obama's middle name is Hussein. The interesting thing was that apparently they one for their entire homeroom. I was chatting with one kid who was eliminated early on, but he gushed to me "my homeroom won!"

Then we ate lunch in the pretty feild. Students brought lunches prepared by hardworking moms, and teachers at bentos prepared by the school cafeteria for free (these are delicious).

After about 45 minutes at our destination, we marched another two and a half hours back down the mountain to school, and then students were dismissed for the day. caught unprepared for the sunny day, I got so sunburned that everyone was telling me my face was red all afternoon. When it continued at my evening Japanese class, I just started telling them I was drunk, which was a lot more fun than it may sound like.

Today at school was a health check, which meant all the other employees and I had to:
1. not eat breakfast
2. get a blood test where they filled three vials of our life juice
3. bring my pee to school in a test tube
4. consult a doctor
5. get a chest x-ray
6. have a hearing test
7. have an eye exam

Pretty comprehensive by my US standards, but in Japan most all offices do this kind of physical for their employees once a year. My coworkers were surprised that this doesn't happen in the US.

入学校式 and Daikon Legs

Today was Entrance ceremony for the new first-years. I would write it up a nice little play-by-play of the event, but truth be told, it was exactly the same as the last 4 or 5 ceremonies I have already blogged. Lots of speeches from the same people. Many a name called, many a bow exchanged, and so on for about an hour and a half. The interesting thing is that I got to check out the freshman class for the first time. These will be MY students. They looked so grave as the marched into the gymnasium/auditorium today. Grave as hell, poor things.

One poor, unfortunate class consists entirely of boys. 40 of em. Ah, they must've been seething as they discovered their homeroom assignment today, and looked around at the other classes which are evenly divided between testosterone and estrogen. I'd've been pissed (like that double contraction?). the best part is that this all-boys class seems to have all of the bigger guys in it who look like they practice judo. There is also one boy who, i'd estimate, is about 6'2". No joke. All that nonsense about Japanese being small is hogwash. These kids come in LARGE, even at 15.

The second-year homerooms were also shuffled and wound up with one all-boys class too. I dont understand why they are doing this, as it seems like a recipe for disaster, but hey, it's not mine to judge. Well it is, but I will do so quietly and on the internet. Vice Principal tried to explain this restructuring to me, but I didn't really get it, other than that it has something to do with the gender-divided gym classes and or the electives (Art, Music, Calligraphy). I will report back if i figure this out.

One interesting thing about today's ceremony that differed was that the parents and guests were asked to put away their own folding chairs, then the new students were instructed to put them on dollys and cart them into storage by themselves. this struck me as rude, but I guess it is intended to set a serious/strict attitude about our school. I was chatting with one of the new English teachers as the chairs were being sorted and she asked me how years I have been living in Japan. Later, in the break room as we fixed our respective coffee and tea, she asked me if I had studied Japanese in college. Apparently the basic Japanese I have accrued so far was enough to make her assume that I had been here several years already. She was surprised that I was only 8 months in. That made me all happy and proud inside. One advantage of living where out here in the rice-paddy wilderness is I do get a lot of practice. But unlike many assume, this is not sufficient to absorb Japanese skill. Many inaka ALTs spend years in the countryside and still can't order food. I think the advantage lies in the fact that... what litle studying i DO accomplish pays off immediately and is quickly cemented by high volume practice. After learning a new grammar point I frequently hear things my Japanese friends have said to me over and over again replaying in my head, with a new cloud of understanding. Suddenly there is a feeling of having reached a tiny, incrementally wider threshold of ability. And that is a nice feeling.

One more thing I want you to know about: Daikon Legs. Daikon legs are basically the Japanese equivalant of American "cankles," except that the meat aggregates not around the ankles, but the at calves, and the phenomenon seems to be naturally/genetic opposed to McDonalds-induced.

To clarify, these are daikon:

...a kind of white, arm-sized, Japanese radish

And THESE...

...are Daikon Legs. Get it? (creepy escalator photo courtesy of google images). Perhaps surprisingly, Japan is full of these legs, proudly bulging within thin layers of nylon. Not to say that these legs belong to chunky ladies. No, no, quite contrary, they are typically found at the bases otherwise petit women. What do you make of it, dear reader?

"ne" sensei

copied from my IRL notepad journal:

This week, the weather has changed again. After a shaky start of intermittent and misleading warm days, it seems that spring has finally come to stay. Yesterday I was commuting to my weekly Japanese class downtown, and I was actually uncomfortably hot on the train, which was a nice change of pace. It means that the weather will be beautiful for about 2 weeks followed by hordes of giant mutant insects and what one of my friends likes to call "the death heat."

It's an emotional time of flux at work as well; yesterday marked the last day of classes and teacher transfers were announced, which is to say the Board of Education released the information about which teachers will transfer to a new school in the Spring and which will stay put. This process occurs entirely without input from the teachers concerned and they are informed of the decision with about 2 week's notice.

One by one throughout the afternoon, the principal called the teachers in question to his office for individual meetings. I was speaking with my supervisor at the end of the day when the vice principal excused himself for interrupting, and beckoned her to follow him into the hallway. She came back five minutes later--visibly shaken--and told me she will be transferring to a school near the city. That means in two weeks we will receive a new English teacher and I'll be assigned a different supervisor (most likely a teacher who is already here). My feelings on that topic are mixed and multifaceted, and a touch too delicate for the public domain, so if you're interested in the specifics, may I suggest that you contact me by email?

Today, after an Oo-soji (extended cleaning period) in which the floors were waxed, we have filed into the gymnasium, where the school closing ceremony is being delivered as I scribble this on sheets of B5 paper on a blue clipboard. Closing ceremonies consists of speeches, the singing of the school song, and the bestowment of award certificates. Are you noticing a pattern yet? There is one teacher who always gives speeches during these events and every other word out of his mouth is "ne" or "desune," which is sort of akin to the overuse of "like" during English speeches. I started noticing it a while back and now I just laugh every time he starts going. He doesn't say it when he speaks normally or to small groups. Only when addressing the whole school. desune?

One homeroom group of boys consipred to be really cool by wearing their summer uniforms instead of the winter ones that everyone else is still wearing. The students have their free choice as to which uniform to wear--between the short-sleeved light cotton summer uniforms or the woolen dark blue and black winter fare. One group of boys tends to deviate as a posse and show off by wearing the out-of-season uniform for formal events. It's a Japanese thing about the association between being cold and toughness.

I am so excited for next year and all of the changes! From this week, I will be reorganizing my desk and outlining a curriculum for the year. If that sounds boring to you, keep in mind that I joined this school mid-year. inheriting a job, desk and materials from various predecessors, and largely had to plan my class week by week on the fly because of being thrown into a poorly organized deep-end. The notion of having the chance to take ownership of my classes for the first time, organize my own accumulating teaching materials, and implement my own teaching policies is very, very exciting.

クラスマッチ

Yesterday was Class Match (Kurassu macchi), a day in which the first and second year students (third years are graduated and gone by now) compete as homeroom teams in various sports. Boys played soccer and girls played volleyball. Although the boys only played during the morning, due to rain, the girls' volleyball tournament continued all day, from 8:30 to 3. Of no surprise to me by this point, they were SO into and extremely coordinated as homeroom teams. Matching outfits, colorcoordinated to class year (blue for first year, green for second) and small choregraphed cheers before and during the games. SCREAMING, oh the screaming.

One homeroom team consisted of my first group of cleaning students, so I have a few special friends there. They were so excited to see me watching them and asked me to lead their pre-game cheer, which consisted of huddling, saying something motivational like "do your best!" and then putting our hands together in the middle and yelling as we throw our arms up. They made it to the finals!

After the boys soccer was cancelled, they came to cheer on their female homeroom counterparts. Boys slowly started peeking in through the doors, and then flooded into the gym, watching from the sidelines and balconies. Girls on teams between games cheered on their classmates or passed out in a corner from exhaustion.

The closing ceremonies involved no fewer than SIX speeches from the Principal, various faculty and distinguished students. Awards were distributed, winning teams announced, and sage wisdom dispensed. The students sat on the gymnasium floor silently, a few awkward cheers slipping out from the winning homerooms as their victories were acknowledged. One student's head began to bob in the early stages of "sleeping during something you're supposed to be listening to" and one of the other English teachers briskly walked over to where he was seated, and yanked his head up by the collar. This is fairly common.

But altogether it was a great event and it was so nice to see a different side of my students. It was refreshing to see them cutting loose and acting like regular teenagers; very reassuring that they are HUMAN. I think that special planned sports days and events like this help ensure that the grueling and academically sterile environment is maintained and respected on an otherwise regular basis.

Graduation (卒業)

In Japan, high school students do not typically graduate in the fall. They graduate in Spring. On March first. That happens to be today. Falling on a Sunday, and being preceded by a rehearsal yesterday, today's graduation marks the 7th consecutive day of my work week. Luckily we will receive compensatory holidays this Monday and Tuesday.

ALTs and visitting Americans often comment on the very formal seriousness of Japanese High School graduation, so I was prepared to behold a real spectacle. But truth be told, I don't feel that my graduation from high school in America was much less serious or formal than this one. The interesting point is that they are serious in different ways and the culture of formality is quite different in Japan and America.

The major players
-School principal, who is decked out in a tux with tails for today's events
-Vice Principal, my boss
Night School Vice Principal
-All the teachers, looking their finest, wearing nice suits or kimonos, organized in folding chairs along the side of the gymnasium.
-All the students (wearing their regular uniforms, no caps and gowns). Students are partitioned by year--seniors in the front, freshmen in the back--and homeroom. They are then further separated into clusters of boys and girls.
-All the parents, seated behind the students
-The Brass Band, set up in a make-shift band pit in the back corner of the gmnasium.
-The Chorus Club, situated in the upper balcony in the back of the room
-The two teachers who do photography and video, traversing the catwalks, capturing everything from above.

Before the service began, I was in charge of working with my supervisor at the welcome desk in the front of the school. We greeted VIPs entered the school with cheerful "Ohayou Gozaimasu"s and signed them in, giving them a welcome packet and a ribbon to wear, a pink and white runner up-looking ribbon for regular Alumni, and a huge red "GRAND PRIZE" looking ribbon for extremely important visitors and guests of the principal. After everyone arrived, we entered the gymnasium.

The ceremonies began as the senior (third year) students marched into the hall accompanied by the brass band playing triumphant music, though not Auld Lang Syne, which is typically reserved in Japan for the ending of important projects and/or ushering customers out of businesses around closing time. As the students filed in, led by their homeroom teachers, we had to clap continually for 10 minutes until every student was seated.

After they were assembled as described above, without missing a beat, the Chorus club immediately began singing "Hallelujah" from the balcony. None of the parents tried to turn around in their seat or look at the singing students above and behind them, they just looked forward blankly at the principal who stood motionless, waiting at a podium on the stage. Upon finishing with a harmonizing "Amen," the Chorus Club students filed out of the gym promptly and quietly without applause from the audience. This was eerie.

After some too-long opening remarks from the principal, each student's name was called by their homeroom teacher from a podium beside the stage. One by one, the students of each class stood up from their seats, saying (preferably yelling) "Hai!" (Yes!). Some students roared it out, while others barely made a peep. All the boys first, then the girls for each class. After the entire homeroom was standing, they were instructed to sit down together, and the next homeroom teacher approached the podium, while the "next at bat" teacher got up from his/her seat and stood off to the side.

Then, certain students were honored for achievements or perfect attendance. One at a time they were called up the the stage by the Discipline teacher from the side podium. One by one they ascended to the stage, first bowing to the giant framed Japanese flag, then to the principal. One of my favorite co-English teachers, clad in ornate kimono and white gloves that were reminescent of Bugs Bunny, handed the certificates from an ornate carrying tray to the principal, who then handed them to the students and congratulated them. They bowed to each other once more, and the student left the stage.

That was followed by a series of long-winded speeches that I mostly didn't understand by the principal, special guests, and important alumni. Before and after each speech, the "discipline" teacher instructed the audience in unison to rise, stand at attention, bow, and then sit down again. We sang the national anthem and school song at certain points, as well.

Next came a series of concluding speeches from student representatives. First up was one of my favorite students, a second year and the former president of student council. I believe his speech was on behalf of the underclassmen to the graduating class. Things got more emotional when the representatives of the graduating classes gave their speeches. First a boy representing the regular day school gave his speech, and about halfway through his thank-you's to mom, dad and teachers, he began to creak and sniffle. Next was a girl represented the night school. It took her a good minute or two to pull herself together and start speaking, and she cried throughout the whole speech. I didn't understand much of what she said, but then all the parents and everyone around me started weeping. It was a slow sniffle at first, that moved through the crowd uniformily. Then people, seemingly as a coordinated, cohesive whole, began taking out their little towels and wiping their eyes. It all looked almost rehearsed. Apparently this happens at all graduations, as my Vice Principal warned me. It HAS to happen.(1)

After that was a speech from one representative parent, which didn't move everyone quite as much as the night school student, and then the brass band started up again and we clapped for another solid 5 or 10 minutes as the graduating class filed out in a line.

Once back in the school, the third year students had one last homeroom class, in which they presumably said final goodbyes to these teachers who have followed them throughout the three years. Now all the students are running around the school with their friends and families, getting yearbooks signed, yelling, giving flowers to special teachers, and generally being very excited.

All in all, it was new cultural experience, but not altogether different from the way things go down in America. We also wear nice suits and get very excited and organized over high school graduation. There may be fewer speeches, and there may be no discipline teacher barking "stand! attention! bow! sit!" but i believe that these are cultural transpositions of a similar degree of formality.

I have no schedule for the rest of the day 2 more hours, and then the teachers will have an enkai (office party) to celebrate.
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(1)As an interesting aside, most Japanese people always seem to have a tiny towel on hand. Taking a page from Hitch-hiker's guide, maybe. They are commonly exchanged as "thank-you-for-your-gift" gifts.

closing ceremonies

Well that was interesting. My school just had our closing ceremonies for winter vacation. It's called closing ceremonies and treated like an end of the year thing, yet the students will come back for one more trimester and the school year actually ends in April. Strange then that they have all of these award ceremonies and formalities for just a 2 week break. I mean most of the kids going to keep coming to school for club sports anyway. Here's what my day has been like so far:

8:30: morning meeting. This happens every day, but the teachers were acting extra formal and excited this morning, and there seemed to be more information than usual. While often only the vice principal talks, this time many teachers stood up to make announcements

8:50: Big clean-up time. Usually the students clean up the school for 15 minutes at the end of the day. Students are broken into cleaning posse's of 10-15 and assigned a location to clean, which periodically changes. Each teacher, also is assigned to supervise a location, and help clean, depending on the individual. I supervise the staff room and i help the students sweep up dust and chat with them in english. So today cleaning time was in the morning and lasted 40 minutes. After the regular cleanup of sweeping the dust around, we waxed the floors. Yeah. Waxed. That was interesting. We didnt have enough mops to spread the wax around so a few other students and I worked it into the floor by hand. My boss was impressed to see me working hard on my hands and knees, but was concerned about my pants getting dirty, lol. After we waxed for a while, I told the students they did an awesome job this year and that i'll miss them next year! (theyll probably get rotated to a new location). I had told them earlier this week that they could give me a letter to bring to America and i would have someone write back to them. And one girl who used to be in my crew but got moved wrote a letter to me!

Dear. Mr Michael
Hello! I am Yuka Ikenono.
I enjoyed talking with you. I was looking forward to going to a staff room to clean.

I think that English is very difficult.
But, it is fun for me to talk it.
I want to develop myself English and whisk through books in English in no time.

By the way, what is a look during Christmas in America? I am sure of lively town.
Do you eat a cake on Christmas?

Thank you for reading a letter. See you again.

from Yuka

awwwwwww.

9:30 Students and teachers meet in the gymnasium
We all met up in the gym. The teachers all sat on pre-arranged folding chairs that were set up on tarps so that we could wear our regular shoes inside. Then the students all lined up according to year, homeroom and gender, as they always do. This one group of boys seated near me were all wearing their summer uniforms, which are white, short-sleeved button-down shirts instead of their winter uniforms (a black coat with a stand-up collar). I asked them later what the heck they were thinking and they were like "We wanted to do it together! We are HARDCORE" haha a lot of the guy students like showing off by wearing their shortsleeved uniforms or shortsleeved gym shorts to outdoor PE classes. They have to wear uniforms but the school doesn't enforce which type they wear when. Haha there was also one girl who was wearing her summer uniform until a few weeks ago.

Everyone was then instructed to stand up, attention, bow, then sit down. The teachers do it too.

Then the school song was played on piano and sung by everyone.

Next the principal was introduced by vice principal
Principal climbs up to the stage, stops, bows to the Japanese flag, goes to the podium, bows the audience (audience bows back) and then begins his speech. Our principal... uh... isn't the best orator. He tends to ramble on past everyone's attention span. It's funny how I can notice that rapport between him and the audience even without understanding the speech. Same thing happened at the morning meeting. He kept rambling past the bell. Anyway he began his speech by talking about the "Sub Prime Loan problem" and was talking about other high schools for some reason. Then he suddenly started talking about difficult kanji and japanese words. He had the whole audience repeat difficult words and phrases after him. i had no idea what was going on.

During the speech one kid wearing a sick mask had to leave due to exhaustion, and was ushered out by his homeroom teacher. Another teacher standing next to me had some kind of panic attack while we were singing the school song and had to sit down (we were all standing for the song and the principal's speech). He started rocking back and forth with his head in his hands and sat there for the rest of the time, eventually leaving the room before the end of the ceremony. The same guy had an emotional/stress breakdown last week too and was taken away on a gurney in an ambulance. Of course these kinds of issues don't warrant psychological help or time off from work. One teacher was "helping him" by standing behind him, as if supervising, like he would step in if the guy started flipping out and screaming or something, which only drew everyone's attention to the situation. Awkward.

Next the head-teacher gave a speech. He is pretty cool and somehow, this will sound weird, has a voice appropriate for an english speaking dog character in a cartoon. Also, like, he would, like, use the phrase "desu ne" after, like, every few words, which is the equivalant of saying like...like...like over and over again in English. But he cracked some awesome jokes and it got the audience laughing and a little loosened up. He's cool.

Then the hardass discipline teacher gave a speech. He started with a joke, which made students laugh, but then got really serious and was talking about the difficulties of something or another. It's interesting to notice different individual speaking styles even (especially?) in a language you don't understand. Has anyone else ever notice this? It makes me wonder what the overall impression of my speaking style would be for a Japanese person. Probable "not confident enough"

The procedure for each speaker was the same: they climbed the stairs to the stage, then bowed to the Japanese flag, then went to the podium, then bowed again. I love the formality of it all.

Finally there was an awards ceremony for student achievements. The students ran from various places in the audience to line up offstage, where one teacher put them in the order they would be called on. They all took off their inside shoes and stood at attention while someone gave a speech about the award ceremony that was about to happen. Then they were called up in 2 groups of 8. First the whole group bowed to the principal who was at the podium, then he acknowledged each student for his or her achievement, gave em a certificate and stated the date, then they bowed to each other and everyone clapped. after all of them had recieved their certificate, the group would turn to face the audience and bow. We bow back.

Lastly there was one more too-damn-long speech by the principal, then everyone left. I chatted with some of my student pals and thanked Yuka for her letter. Now it's lunch time!

zomg, overbooked and hectic

 
NO TIME TO WRITE A REAL ARTICLE...

but some important/interesting things have been going down that you might enjoy at least knowing about and that i'm sure i will enjoy having a record of so here goes:

1. I'll probably stay here in Amagi rather than moving to Futsukaichi as offered. it'd be inconvenient and expensive, and maybe not even more fun in the long run.

2. had my first enkai (get-drunk-with-the-office party) after sports day on sunday. preceeded by my first get-naked-with-some-colleagues experience too-- a japanese style bath (onsen). It wasnt as awkward as it shoulda been. at the enkai, poured beer for my bosses and met their VIP friends, including an awesome-at-english accounting who's wife wants to make me dinner every week and invite me over

tomorrow i have a welcome party for English Club and then another welcome party enkai with the english department. nonstop OMG!

3. Met some other english speakers who live local at the bus stop! a japanese woman and a woman from the Phillipines who both teach at a private english school owned by a dude from california. Cool!

4. Sports day was, obviously, outrageous. see below:

5. I STARTED TEACHING FORREALS TODAY. my first three classes. see post below.

6.went to kurume- a relatively big city much closer to me than fukuoka. very cool place. bats, yakuza, indian food, cute waitresses. i like it. went down there to meet Arthur, the ALT in charge of organizing regional events. cool cat.

Oh and we saw a really creepy pedophile in a coffee shop. This sketchy, old british guy in a frumpy suit coat chatting up this girl in a high school uniform. very scary like. after a couple minutes he got up abruptly, knocking over a table and left in a hurry mutturing "That was a disaster." We asked the girl what happened and if she was ok. She said he just bought a coffee and sat down next to her and started talking. She assumed he was with an eikaiwa (private english teaching company). not cool. scary.

7. i bought a wii

8. tomorrow the prefecture is coming to inspect my broken kitchen floor to see if it qualifies for repair. it looks like this:

9. have i mentioned that i love my students? I do.

greater than the sum of its parts

I remember sitting on the couch with Rosie and Brett back in Worcester, watching Blue Planet, a series produced by the BBC devoted to the amazing life to be found in the Ocean. In the Pacific, they featured are huge schools of small fish. When a whale comes up from the abyss to feed, the hundreds of fish school together into a giant whirling ball of whale-food. The whales feed in passes. rushing through the swarm over and over again until theyve had their fill, and retreat. while apart none of the fish can outrun the whale, most of the school will survive by sheer volume, the group manages to carry on without splitting up.

Meanwhile it is cicada season in Japan. The cicadas (semi) are everywhere and they spend most of their time screaming for sex at the top of their lungs (thoraxes?).. It's kind of mating call that i imagine is similar to what it might be like to stand next to a landing fleet of UFOs. 

Semi spend the majority of their life (often more than ten years) in a larval state below the ground. During maturation, they crawl out of the ground and transform into giant noisy creatures with wings but no mouths, and apparently no sense of direction, as they fly into everything. Their sole purpose, since it obviously isn't eating, is to reproduce. and they do so in humongous generations called broods. 

I should also mention that semi are delicious to most larger animals, some humans included. Therefore, the life-cycle of a cicada is always a prime number of years because it keeps the predators from adapting to a natural flowing rhythm of delicious adult semi wafting through the air. But the main defense mechanism of semi is, again, sheer volume. By reproducing in such huge broods, they ensure that predators can have their fill (it's inevitable really) and there will STILL be enough reproducing individual to keep the population steady.

Bearing in mind these two examples, let us re-evaluate the schooling patterns of another species-- a subpopulation, like the fish, native to the South Pacific.

[photos to come]

While watching practice in the gym today, i commented to my supervisor how interesting the emphasis on group dynamics is to me. I mentioned how seeing everyone move together is so entrancing, and reminds me of the schooling fish.

"To us, this is the concept of absolute beauty."

"You mean complete group coordination?"

"Yes. In Japan, if you lose your individual identity... it's okay."  

gestalt culture

It's interesting what is and isn't acceptable at work and in public in Japan. For example, it would be considered extremely rude for me to cross my legs ankle-to knee right now, or put on my sunglasses even here in the harsh sun. Meanwhile, a nearby teacher wears a huge green translucent visor the he's angled down across his face, creating a sort of welding-mask effect. beside me, two teachers exchange what sounds like useful gossip, and the teacher to my right sleeps in his folding chair.

In fact, it's acceptable to sleep almost anywhere under any circumstances, which tells me that sleep is neglected here on a national scale. It's especially common to sleep on the bus or train. it's quite usual to see businessmen, heads down and eyes closed, supposedly sleeping even as they stand on their 5-minute commute, clinging to the hand grips dangling from above.

The students are all dressed in white tshirts and color-coordinated gym shorts corresponding to their class year. I sit with the other teachers in my "sports clothes" --a tech shirt and gym shorts-- under the shade of a tent pitched by the students. Some of the teachers are decked out in white baseball caps, track suits and many of the women wear light jackets and wide-brimmed hats to shield themselves from the sun beating down, attempting to keep their skin pale (more feminine).

We sit in folding chairs under shaded oasis in the middle of the sports field as a brass band military march is piped over the field through tinny loudspeakers. The students march in place in eight blocks organized by gender and class rank, legs all rising and falling in unison. Blocks of dark legs and light legs. Blocks of boys and girls.

watching the students practice for Sports Day, coming up this weekend, i suddenly feel that i am sitting on a scene at a training camp during World War II in Japan. The students begin to march around the field in synchrony and practice raising their arms, straight out at a 45 degree angle as they pass the teachers' tent, evoking an eerily nazi military aesthetic that disagrees with their gym shorts and smiling faces. along with the tinny march music blaring on loop over the speakers, it feels like i've been dropped into a black and white newsreel.

However, although these marching drills are perhaps military-inspired, they have little to do with aggression or violence and everything to do with group-mindedness, arguably the fundamental component informing Japanese social culture. The students leard to fall into order, becoming simple moving parts of a bigger, complex whole. 1000 pairs of legs rising and falling together. Blocks of dark legs and light legs. Blocks of colored shorts.

My vice principal, (my boss) is new to our staff this year, and so it is his first Sports Day at Asakura High School as well. He turns to me from his folding chair just to my right and says as an aside,

"Beautiful, isnt it?"

I have to agree. Like the many bubbly arms of some sea anemone waving together in the same ocean current, the students all moving together perfectly becomes something larger than itself. Something that hints at group consciousness. Japan, a nation with few natural resources, a small string of islands in the Pacific, surrounded by larger countrie, has developed for itself a toolbox of cultural developments that allow it to become greater than the sum of its parts. Attitudes that menetrate every aspect of the culture. Perhaps the school system in particular.

The students are marching past us again, arms outstretched, folding then neatly, row by row, as they pass the teachers' sanctuary of shade. Another group of students acting as color-guard traverse the field, carrying a twelve foot Japanese flag in two rows of four. a lone student leads the group bearing the school flag: a green field embroidered with gold, containing the school logo and name, written in kanji, in the middle.

The flag-bearers stop midfield and march in place as the hundreds of other students march, blocked, around the field, lining up to join them marching in place.

A teacher in a bright white baseball cap and white polo shirt, collar popped, yells commands on the loudspeaker over the music, which is now starting again on loop for the 5th or 6th time. The students now wait as the music stops and they receive what i can only imagine to be a pretty harsh critique from the drill teacher.

Now they run back to the end of the field and form, again, their perfect straight rows by raising their arms straight out in front of them, and measuring aligning themselves with those in front.

The music begins again and they start to run the drill once more. They will be practicing all week.