2001-10-17 - 10:28 p.m.
I wish I could write more often, but the truth is I’m really busy these days. Monday through Friday I have school, of course, which occupies my day from 8 AM - 5 PM. Then on Monday there’s karate (7-10 PM); on Tuesday, my adult ed. class (6:30-9:30 PM) and on Wednesday I have Japanese class (7-9 PM). On the first three days of the week, I find it hard to do all this and still keep the apartment clean, keep in touch with people, write diary entries, cook a real dinner, and get enough sleep -- so something always slips (actually, all of the above usually slip). I’ve pledged not to go to Tokyo this weekend so that I can save a little money, catch up on some sleep, and generally take care of business around the house.
I’m also getting ready to change schools. Friday marks the end of my 7-week stint at school #1. On Monday, I’ll start at a new junior high school which I’ll stay at until December. The new school is a lot different from my current one -- the one I’m at now has 500 students, my next one has less than half that. My current school is set off a big Route 9/Rockville Pike type road (think Denny’s, 7-11s, and car dealerships), and my next one is a twenty-minute bike ride through rice fields. I’ll be sad to leave this school, but I’m excited for the change. I’ve grown to really like some of the students -- especially, it turns out, the hyper-active class clowns. The best (or worst?) class clowns make it hard for me to keep a straight face in front of the class, even though the jokes they are shouting out are in Japanese. There is one 1st year boy in particular who I think could be Japan’s next great comedian -- or maybe he’ll become the funny salaryman at the next desk. Moving from class to class, I’ve gotten to see every kid in the school, and lately I’ve been thinking about this fantasy photo project I’d love to (but could never) do. I want to group the kids into group portraits as I see them -- one photo would be of the handful of scrawny boys who are as small as elementary school kids. Another would be of the class clowns. Another of the “bad girls” -- the ones who blatantly brandish cell phones (which are illegal at school) or do their makeup in the back of the classroom. Another portrait would be of the chronic sleepers who I’m always nudging with the textbook. Just a thought.
The kids are doing an insane amount of practice right now for the upcoming chorus festival. Since I arrived at the school in the beginning of September, I noticed odd, seemingly impromptu choral practices springing up all over the school. In the ten minutes in between classes, groups of 6-10 students would plug in a boom box in the hallway and stand around it, singing along with the tape until the bell rang. In the twenty minutes before club activities start in the afternoon, about 60 kids would gather in a long hallway near the teachers’ room and practice a song as one student played the score on a wheeled-in keyboard and another conducted. These kids are always singing. Now that the chorus concert is approaching, it’s reached something of a frenzy. Now in addition to the hallway singing, there is classroom singing before each class and 45 minutes of singing in homerooms after 6th period. As the homeroom teachers supervise and coach, the kids split up into 3 or 4 groups, each with their own tape recorder. In one corner of the room, the soprano girls are practicing and in the opposite corner, it’s the boys. I walked down the 1st year hall today to find six girls lying on the floor outside the classroom with their hands on their abdomens. They were doing leg lifts to strengthen their muscles for singing, while a classmate monitored the exercises with a stopwatch. The amazing thing is that the kids seem to be incredibly into it -- all of them. Maybe this is in part because the music teacher seems to be a dynamic and well-liked figure. When he addresses the students, he’ll stand up on a chair (and he’s probably about 300 pounds) and give a speech, which I can’t understand, but from the faces of the students, seems to be funny, encouraging, firm, and utterly mesmerizing. There is a great degree of student leadership in the chorus practice -- students are the conductors, and each section of the chorus has a student leader who critiques their peers after each run-through. And on top of it all, the kids sound amazing. This is incredible considering that chorus is not a voluntary thing for only the students who can sing well. Every student in the school sings, and they sound great.
Speaking of singing, I saw a funny thing on TV today -- a Japanese gospel choir. They were singing in a planetarium (!) with a big cross projected on the ceiling amongst the stars. The choir leader demonstrated the stepping and clapping pattern, and the choir launched into some gospel song, in English, of course. It was truly odd. The Japanese have a very interesting perspective on Black American culture, which I’m still trying to tease out. Last weekend in Tokyo I bought a Japanese hip hop magazine, full of articles on Black fashion and hairstyles -- worn by Japanese. Later that night I went to a party at a Japanese friend’s house, and the guest of honor was a hip 30-something Japanese woman with huge, permed Afro (Jafro?) -- we’re talking Roberta Flack big. I was trying to explain to my Japanese friend why I found this so funny and intriguing. It just seems so out of context, I told her. Imagine if you went to American and there were magazines devoted to helping Black or white girls to look Japanese! The connection to the music is somewhat more understandable to me, and there are many home-grown Japanese hip hop acts, as there are in many other countries all over the world. But the adoption of so many of the visual signifiers of American “blackness” is not as immediately understandable and thus really interesting to me. It seems like a lot gets lost in translation, as they say.
An aside: Japanese kids are big eyebrow pluckers - especially the boys. Many of the 2nd and 3rd year boys have tweezed most of their eyebrows away into pencil-fine arches. Unlike the girls however, they don’t work on achieving this effect with tweezers and a hand mirror in the middle of class.
