It was ‘scat month’ at
Mister Donut in February, so recently when I entered my favourite haunt for
cheap, pre-class hot coffee, it sounded more like a 1930’s speakeasy than an
orange and yellow- themed donut joint. Every month the music is a different
theme, and sometimes it’s really nice. In January it was a tribute to Fats
Domino, with some great artists singing covers, and before that was Roy Orbison
and The Travelling Wilburys. The good months get me through the hideous boy band
or screaming teen queen months. As I have mentioned, I am getting to know the
staff as well as I can with the language barrier, and they’re all very nice to
me (I taught the manager to say, “The second cup is free!”). I am recognizing
some of the regulars, too. Lots of high school students come to ‘MisDo’ just
around my break time. There’s also a very elegant, slightly bohemian lady who is
often there at the same time as me (and often inclines her head at me and says
“konnichiwa” with a gracious smile), and two women in their sixties who seem to
be best friends and full of life and humour. Sometimes I imagine Sam and myself,
a few decades down the road, in their place.
The other day, I stopped
at Mister Donut on a crowded Saturday afternoon, desperate to stretch my legs
and slam back some caffeine before my last three classes. It was busy enough
that I had to sit at the counter, where I found myself seated next to three
young boys just finishing off their donuts. After a moment of shyness at this
unusual person planted next to them, they began to chatter away to me, full of
curiosity. It really didn’t seem to bother them that I understood only the
tiniest fraction of their conversation. I gleaned a few things: the littlest boy
was five (he informed me so, showing all five fingers proudly), they wanted to
know where I was from (they had a hazy idea that Canada was America’s
neighbour), they wanted to know my name, and my mother’s name and my father’s
name. One leapt up and dragged first his embarrassed bigger brother, and then
his bashful bigger sister over to say “hi”. Their mothers leaned in to
apologize, but I laughed and said, “di jobu (It’s OK.)” Finally they all said
“Bye-bye,” and drifted out the door into the gray, rainy day. But they had
lifted my spirits after a long, long week.
We had a miracle here:
two straight days of sunny weather. Perked me right up, it did. My eyes felt
unaccustomed to the strange, bright light in the sky. The low, rolling mountains
to the north and east were dusted with a light powder of icing sugar snow. The
next morning dawned promisingly, but shortly after I got to work the wind
and slushy snow kicked back in, and my bike ride home was singularly unpleasant.
Tomorrow I’ll walk.
I’ve been continuing my
thoughts about the future and about the past recently. In some ways, I’m in a
much better place than I was last year. My frustration and need for some sort of
positive change propelled me to Japan, but I arrived here with all of my issues
intact. When I arrived here, I was feeling my age. No longer a young woman, no
longer in my twenties, although of course I look very young for my age. In
Halifax, the acting roles I was sporadically going out for were for women in
their early to mid-twenties, and there are so many young, talented, beautiful
actresses vying for those same roles that I felt at a disadvantage. And
immediately upon arriving in Japan, it became obvious that among the foreign
teachers here, I am definitely senior. There are a handful of people like
Stephen, who, though he guards his the secret of his age jealously, has to be in
his late fifties or early sixties, but I’m guessing the average JET or English
conversation school teacher is about 26 – ten years younger than me. I think
being older gives me some advantages – for example, I haven’t made some of the
errors in judgement I surely would have made ten years ago, and I’m a mature,
hardworking teacher – but when I got here, the difference plagued me a lot. Part
of the problem is that I’m pretty competitive, especially with other women.
My obsessive concern with
my age has faded a lot this year, though – possibly a sign that I am growing up.
Still, it's strange to look in a mirror and see myself as a woman teetering at
the edge of middle age. I felt the same kind of double vision when I came home
at Christmas and saw so many old friends, relatives, university pals and
childhood playmates. I realized that in their faces I was seeing two people: the
person they are now and a person preserved, forever youthful in memory,
with the two images superimposed like slides. It’s kind of comforting to know
that a part of a person always remains the same, and that you keep seeing, in
the faces of mature men and women, the children and adults that grew up with you
and around you.
So although I am becoming
more comfortable with my age, I have to wonder: Will I ever feel like an adult?
And do I want to? As a child, I eagerly
crammed my head with knowledge and trivia about mythology, ancient history,
science, folk tales, astrology, astronomy, fantasy, art, and anything that
crossed my path. I read constantly, classics and trash alike, bundled up beside
the stove in an old afghan with the dog sighing in her sleep at my feet. Now I
sometimes feel the things I’ve learned are flaking away like yellowed onion
paper, all those things that transform a mundane life into a magical one. And I
realize, watching them flutter away in the wind, that I don’t want to live a
mundane life. I want magic – me and Blanche DuBois. And I want to make people
feel that magic in their lives. That said, I don’t want to end up in a madhouse
like Miz Dubois, or to be old and poor and scraping out a living. So right now I
put on my suit and pay off my debts, and contemplate the future.
There are two big changes at AEON this winter. First
Nozu-san, the Assistant Manager since I started, ‘retired’ or quit. I guessed
this when Miyuki Hirano, her replacement, started working around Christmas. But
no one told me. Finally, as Nozu-san was driving me to the office near the
university, I asked her, and after an awkward pause, she said she was leaving at
the beginning of February – but of course it was a secret. It is AEON company
policy not to announce staff changes to students until about two weeks before
any change. When I decide to leave, I will give at least three months notice
(and more likely six months), BUT I will be asked not to tell any students – not
even my friends at the school – until two weeks before my departure date. It was
the same with Melanie, when she left last June. I’m guessing it’s to give a
sense of continuity to students and give them no time to decide to quit if a
favourite teacher leaves, but I hate the secrecy. Especially since it extends to
me. Nozu-san is moving in with her boyfriend, and wants to have more regular
hours. But also I think she’s leaving because she’s burnt out. Assistant
managers are usually young, and work like dogs in their efforts to advertise and
get new students. I suspect there’s a very high burnout rate among them all.
Nozu-san is very nice, but our friendship was thwarted by the communication
difficulties we had, and her somewhat retiring nature. She will, however, still
come to AEON – as a student. I hope she’s getting a discount.
Meanwhile, Nozu-san’s replacement, Miyuki Hirano, is
a lovely young woman. She’s pretty but very natural looking and casual, with a
great laugh. Her family lives forty minutes away, in Hirata, so she’s happy to
be closer to them since moving here from AEON’s Tottori branch. She’s liberal
with treats at the end of the day, offering bite-sized cookies every once in a
while when I’m doing my class prep. And she did something no one ever did
before. I’ve had my picture taken with students for the website or for ads, et
cetera, countless times over the last fourteen months. She gave me copies, so I
have pictures of some of my students. It means a lot to me to have the memories.
The atmosphere is subtly different , in a very positive
way.
Before those changes, Taeko announced in November
that she was quitting. She’s going to finish her contract at the end of March
and then she’s done. I wasn’t surprised, and I have deeply mixed feelings about
her departure. For someone who helps keep me sane in the corporate environment,
she also drives me crazy! She and Ryoko, the manager of our branch, have had
problems, and outside of work, we’ve talked about our head teacher
Mayumi-sensei’s need for control over her environment. I’ve dealt with things by
working hard and keeping my own space and domain in the corner of the office,
which everyone accepts. It helps that I’m the foreign teacher. As long as I am
doing my job well, I’m left to my own devices. It was harder for Taeko, because
expectations were different for her. They pushed her harder, and expected more
work for less money, because she is Japanese. However, Taeko is not typically
Japanese, in that she has a strong mind of her own and a frank, outspoken
nature. She is also deeply sensitive, and we have had problems because I have
done any number of things which she typifies as thoughtless; for example, asking
Mayumi-sensei if I should use the room Taeko sometimes teaches in, instead of
asking Taeko directly (I asked for it because it’s the biggest room, and I had a
large class). I apologized when she explained how she felt, but I couldn’t help
feeling annoyed. I was also basically asked by my manager and head teacher last
fall to stop making small talk with Taeko at work. They said it was to make our
working environment more professional, but sometimes I wonder if it was also to
punish Taeko. They were clear in telling me that they thought Taeko came to work
for AEON just because she wanted to talk to foreigners like me.
Anyway, Taeko has made her plans for April. Shortly after she finishes
working, she is leaving for Italy and the Czech Republic. She is obsessed with
Italy, and has been teaching herself Italian all year, so she’s very excited. So
soon she will fly away. She hasn’t figured out what happens next, but I think
she’s returning to Matsue. I think it will be easier to be her friend that it
has been to be her co-worker.
Classes have been good recently. I’m teaching well,
my students are happy, and prep is easier.
My tennis coach student, Masaki Kashiwai, has been
tired but pleased because his young protégé, Kei Nishikori, beat James Blake to
win an ATP title in Florida on February 18th. This has been huge news
in Japan, and especially in Matsue, so Masaki basically spent the week after the
match giving interviews between every tennis lesson. He tried unsuccessfully to
look poker-faced about it, but his weary, sun-weathered face kept creasing in a
broad smile. I remember when I met him, he seemed so stern and humourless, but
there’s such a soft, open interior to him if you look for it. He’s by far my
favourite student.
Ryoko has been having a silent battle with one of my
students. I don’t know what triggered it, but Ryoko just despises Takane, a
woman who transferred in January from another school. We were talking about her
at the front desk after work one day, and Ryoko said, “She doesn’t like me –
because I hate her.” I had to fight to keep from laughing at the way she said
it. And today, before the evening classes, she said, “My devil is coming. Don’t
make me talk to her.” Takane is a geneticist working at the university – she
studies akagai, or red-shelled clams – and, although she has some social
issues, I don’t see how she has rubbed Ryoko the wrong way so
thoroughly.
My university students have been starting to look for
work, so they tend to pop up these days in very professional, new-looking suits,
fresh from workshops, interviews and company demonstrations. I almost fell over
at the sight of Shinnosuke in a suit. He’s usually very casual, but he dressed
up very nicely, although his untamed shock of hair still stood out in a nimbus
around his head. And his best friend Kohei looks extremely nice in a suit – nice
enough for the Blanche Dubois in me to say, “Young, young, young, YOUNG man”.
They are such interesting pals. Kohei kind of shines – friendly, uncomplicated,
handsome, a great student – and Shinnosuke is a kind of easy-going foil to him.
No real grudges here, although Shinnosuke did whack Kohei with his textbook on
Valentine’s day when Kohei revealed how many Valentines he got.
March has begun. This is a crazy month. At the end of
it, everything changes. School ends and begins again, a new AEON term starts
(with TWO new textbooks to make lesson plans for – eek!), people start new jobs
or get transferred, some students leave and new students begin. Everyone wants
lots of new students, so I’ll be out giving out flyers at the high schools a few
times this month and doing many interviews. Takako, one of my university
students, is off to a Washington State university to study English for a year,
and she’s very nervous and excited. A girl named Risa, who I’ve been teaching
since I started, is off to university – also to study English. She’s nervous
about it, but very poised for a high school girl. It’s been quite funny –
sometimes in our grammar class I just have her and Tetsuya, a high school boy
who started in November (he’s an ex-NOVA student, which means he talks easily,
but with atrocious grammar). Tetsuya is a friendly, eager, puppyish young man.
Risa is quiet, keen and unflappable, like an unblinking cat. Tetsuya just
doesn’t know what to do. Sometimes it’s like the beginning of a junior high
school dance, and I just want to prod them to say SOMETHING. It’s
cute.