LD's Guide to Japan

I’m always amused by how popular President Obama is here in Japan.  Even in this little country town, I get homework handed into me with doodles of his face in the margins.  I was teaching the word ‘can’ (as in ”anything you can do I can do better”) to my first-year junior high students today when they suddenly and without warning began chanting, “Yes we can!  Yes we can!” in the middle of class, just as I had so often heard at Obama rallies last year.  When I tell my students that I met him and shook his hand, they ask me timidly, “are you famous?”

In Kindergarten, however, the kids are pretty much the exact opposite of timid.  They have this wonderful little prank here called a “kancho” (“kancho” actually means “enema” in Japanese, if that gives you an indication of what kind of prank this is) in which they put their hands together and stick their index fingers out like they’re making a pretend gun with their hands, and then they stick those outstretched index fingers right into the center of your butt as hard as they can.  The boys think it’s hilarious.  The girls also have a bizarre obsession with my butt, but they usually just try to pull my pants down instead of kancho-ing me.  Most of the day when I work at Kindergarten, I have to walk around with one or both hands behind me blocking my butt.