2001-10-08 - 4:19 p.m.
Last week I decided to be a good JET and do one thing that the program urges us so strongly to do: join a club activity at school. I am lucky in that my current school has not only the usual sports clubs, but an art club as well. For several weeks now, I have seen students painting outside after school and thought about joining them. So on Thursday, I went up to the art teacher at lunch and told her that I was interested in visiting the art club. She seemed pleased and told me to come at 3:00. When I arrived at the appointed hour, she showed me around the art room, pointing out paintings and drawings, and recent work the students had been doing for a poster contest. Then she showed me two pottery wheels under a row of windows which looked like they hadn’t gotten much use. I told the teacher that I loved making pottery and she excitedly asked me if I would like to do some right then. Before I knew it, I was strapped into a full-length apron trying to manipulate a rapidly rotating hunk of clay. I hadn’t thrown a pot since my summer camp days, but it’s one of those things you never forget how to do. It felt great to be using the artistic corner of my brain again. I managed to create a halfway decent vase on the first try, and the art teacher was delighted. As I washed up, the teacher left and came back with two cups of coffee. We sat and talked about art, New York, and current exhibitions in Japan. Turns out that she went to art school in Tokyo and her own work is design -- furniture, plastics, and tableware. Need I add that I love design? Indeed, I had found a new friend. When the students started arriving for the art club, they were surprised to see me. The teacher explained that I would be teaching them pottery this afternoon; she pointed out my vase. The students looked astonished, and uttered “segoi!” which is an exclamation used when anything -- from a work of art to a typhoon to the presence of a foreign teacher at the art club -- strikes one as fantastic. That afternoon, I gave about a half dozen students their first pottery lesson. There were so many who wanted to try that I came back on Friday and taught ten more.
On Friday afternoon, the kids had yet another assembly, and this time the topic was Just Say No. The students all carried their chairs from their homerooms down to the gym, and lined them up in perfect rows as if there was a grid on the gym floor (which there isn’t). They fell into a truly impressive silence as the vice principal introduced the afternoon’s topic. Then the principal walked in, followed by the three guest speakers, who bowed as the passed the row of teachers and again facing the students. A woman from the Chiba juvenile center introduced a video. The video taught about various drugs, including pot, cocaine, speed, acid & heroin. Rather than the testimonials of ex-drug addicts that might be featured in an anti-drug video in the states, this one had a decidedly biological focus. For each drug, there were computer-animated simulations of the drug’s impact on the body. Then, they injected a lab rat (a REAL rat) with the drug and taped it as it freaked out. The rat on speed was extremely jittery; the rat on acid was unable to complete the maze to get the cheese. Then there was a dramatization of a desperate person on drugs -- face blurred, stumbling around a messy apartment, stuffing himself with junk food. Throughout all this, the kids were totally silent. When I was in junior high school, an assembly was a public forum for goofing off -- the class clowns had a large audience and lots of silence to disturb with their shouts and jokes. The unspoken rule was: whatever the speaker says, laugh at him. What ever the video shows, laugh at it. When the principal gets up to speak, laugh. If she tells everyone to be quiet, make another joke. Here however, the students seem to reserve such raucous behavior for when the foreign teacher comes to do an English lesson. En mass, these kids are a well-behaved bunch. After the video, the speakers brought out some props. They put a real cigarette in the mouth of a plastic bust -- when they lit the cigarette and pumped a little blood-pressure thing, the lungs filled up with brown smoke. They called up a teacher and three students to the stage, and this troupe performed several “Just Say No” type skits, enacting various situations in which gang members approached an innocent student, offering cigarettes, sake, or drugs. Seeing their peers on stage provoked the event’s first visible reaction from the students. Interestingly, though I might have missed this, the assembly didn’t address Ecstasy or mushrooms, two of the drugs which seem to be the most available here, the latter being legal.
COMING SOON: Account of my weekend trip to Pacific hot springs.
