LD's Guide to Japan

When you have to eat the school lunch in Japan, it’s always a good idea to sit next to a teacher who will eat ANYTHING.

I have unloaded so much uneatable food on my desk-neighbor.

and it’s bad, but not really bad enough to keep me home from work, which is annoying.  Even if it were that bad, though, I might end up going to work anyways because taking sick leave is such a pain here.  You have to get a doctor’s note to take sick leave, which means you have to pay to go see the doctor, then you have to pay extra to get an actual doctor’s note from him/her, and after spending all that money it’s just not even worth it unless you have, like, leukemia or something.

Long story short: I’m at work today, and I’m not happy about it.

Today I went, as I do every Wednesday, to Maezawa Elementary School and was told right away in the morning that my students may not be themselves today.  Over the weekend one of the first-graders had gone to Tokyo for a kidney transplant.  His body, however, rejected the kidney and he passed away shortly after the surgery.  The entire school attended his funeral yesterday.

Being only here a few months, I didn’t get the chance to know him very well, which in itself is a little sad, but it also means it’s not emotionally affecting me to the point where I can’t work.  All day at school, though, you could feel a little bit of emptiness.  Everyone was quiet, somber.  I don’t really know how much kids understand about death at their ages, so I don’t know how much they feel the impact of the loss.  But while they were quieter than usual, they were still at least able to focus—they didn’t seem distracted or depressed in any way as far as I could tell.

In any case, my heart goes out to his family.  I can’t even imagine what they must be going through.

“I want a big cake.  I like cakes.

Cakes are delicious.  Who doesn’t want cake?

When I grow up, I want to eat cake.

Do you have a cake?  I don’t have cake.  Can I borrow your cake?

…

Where is your cake?  It’s in my stomach.”

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.