A day in the life of a Tokyo JHS

22 May 2003, 09:06

Once upon a time, there was a girl who taught exclusively adults – she spent her days teaching very well-behaved cabin attendants how to say “Would you like a drink with your meal, Sir?”. However, after a year and a half of teaching the same material, she became bored as all hell. So she asked her company to send her to a Junior High School as an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher). She thought, “I’m up to the challenge” even though there was a time in the girl’s life when she had the power to make children cry just by looking at them.

So it came to be on a sultry day in late April that she started her tenure in an inner-city Junior High School. When she arrived, she was faced with rows of small wooden boxes with shoes in them. “How strange” she thought, “Do these people walk around with bare feet?” She contemplated that maybe she had accidentally wandered into a Queensland University, until she realised half the boxes had little leather slippers in them. Hoping for the best, she took her shoes off and changed into the leather slippers which were three sizes too small.

She waddled to the staff-room like a duck with a twig poked up its arse so as not to slip out of her slippers, and met with the vice-principal and her JTE’s (Japanese teachers of English), four lovely ladies who laughed off the fact that they messed up the English language on a daily basis. No-one else in the staff-room spoke a word of English, which was probably just as well, as she didn’t want to know what the buff female P.E. teacher sitting next to her had to say.

She had heard stories about how strict Japanese schools were and how the students were so terrified of their teachers and so anxious to get good marks that they would sooner fart the national anthem on television than misbehave in class. Things looked good at the beginning of class when all the students stood up on command and sang “Good-o mornin-gu Miss Kim”. They all sat in orderly rows, one girl and one boy to each desk.

Imagine her surprise when one little bugger in the second to front row, starts whacking the head of the boy in front with his text book. Supressing the urge to snap “Easy there, Tiger!” she reverts to the “Look of Death” (perfected through countless experiences with ogling salary-men) which shuts him up. This look of death proves a welcome disciplinary action in keeping with the Japanese laws of interpersonal communication, that is, doing by not doing, and saying by not saying, which she, frankly, never understood until that moment.

She then realises that, in a complete reversal of the “Good ol’ days” when teachers ruled classes with iron fists, Japanese schools now seem to be at the mercy of Japanese children. This could be both a good and bad thing, she thought. Good, in that Japanese students are learning the value of healthy (for the most part) competition and are being encouraged to make their own decisions. Bad, as at some schools (not the girl’s school), kids can choose whether they go into an advanced, intermediate or elementary class for English. That’s right, they can decide whether they are shit-hot English speakers even when they know perfectly well that they are not. And there’s now’t the teachers can do about it.

And how Japanese students love competition! Quite contrary to the cherished concept of the “Group mentality” in Japanese society, high school classes operate on a completely different plane, more akin to “The Fitter survive; the Weaker go down”. When the ALT introduces games and competitions to the class, excited anarchy erupts as each student fights to win! And when the kids catch glimpse of her bright stickers with English written on them; “Good Job!”, “Wise Choice!”; “Teacher’s Award!” well, lets just say the Tianamen Square uprising had nothing on a third grade English class…

After only three weeks at her school, she looks forward to her Wednesday and Thursday morning classes (the school does, after all, have a coffee machine for its staff, virtually unheard of in most schools). No doubt there will be more idiosyncracies about the Japanese education system that she has yet to discover, however one fact is destined to remain a mystery…

Why is everyone so shit-scared of the P.E. teachers?

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