by Tim Anderson
I knew I loved this woman the first day I taught her. I was teaching a lesson about expressing obligation—e.g., “I have to go to the store” or “I somehow have to come up with five grand for my dealer before midnight or he’s gonna kill my cat”—and we were doing a listen-and-repeat exercise in which I make a statement that the students then turn into a “why” question, in order to practice those treacherous interrogative forms.
Turning to Fumiko, I prompted her with “He had to go visit his mother.” She replied, “Why did he have to go…bank?” So I repeated the sentence again, and she said, a bit thrown off and confused, “Why…bank?” I smiled benevolently, sage-like, and said, “Visit his mother,” while rolling my head to coax the correct answer out of her.
“Why did he have to go to…” she began, looking around at the other students nervously. (Come on, you’re almost there, oh my God, Fumiko—just say it, say it and save us all!) “Bank?” (Argh!)
Now there comes a time in a lesson when the teacher realizes that no amount of correction is going to help. Too much will make her nervous, distracted, and may embarrass her in front of her peers.
“You really want him to go to the bank, don’t you?” I smile, walking over to her and lovingly tapping her shoulder with my hand. “OK, let’s just send him there. He can visit his mother later.”
Right on cue, she said, “Why did he have to visit mother?” I want this woman to move in with me and paint all my clothes.
Over the past year of teaching, I’ve had to contend with the extreme shyness of Japanese students in an English conversation class. Forever concerned with maintaining equilibrium, they have an almost pathological aversion to speaking out of turn, disagreeing outright, or giving the wrong answer. It can make for a precarious environment for teaching English conversation since in order for my job to be performed with any degree of success, I need to get the students speaking without scaring them away.
To teach English as a foreigner in Japan, one must do daily battle with the complex and often frustrating elements of the national psyche that don’t exist in the American mind. For one thing, in the school system here, the classroom atmosphere is one of absolute deference to the teacher. Their word sensei has connotations that our English word teacher does not. Sensei communicates respect and acknowledges the teacher’s role as imparter of wisdom and knowledge. (By contrast, our teacher, to many American students, is just a fancy word for target.) Students are discouraged from speaking out without first being addressed, and if they do speak out, they’d better have the right answer or they will be reprimanded. It’s all about one-way instruction, teacher to students. The student is not so much taught as indoctrinated.
It’s the exact opposite of the American school system, where children are encouraged to speak too much, the result being that we Americans never know when to shut up. Just look at our talk shows, our love of using cell phones while driving, our chatty reality shows, and our obsession with bumper stickers expounding our beliefs in God, political candidates, the genius of our honor students, the righteousness of guns, and living simply so that others may simply live. We Americans excel at giving too much information. The Japanese excel at not giving nearly enough. So the idea of a classroom where students are not only encouraged to speak out but required to do so leaves many of them confused and scared. And not just due to their fear of a foreign teacher. They are also dealing with their fellow Japanese, who will most certainly judge them. If they speak too enthusiastically or answer too many questions, they will be seen as arrogant and a show-off, a protruding nail in need of a good whack-down.
At first it didn’t bother me that it took a good fifteen to twenty minutes of my asking questions to a deadly silent classroom before they would relax and start talking. But when you deal with this lack of responsiveness day in day out, it starts to make you a little touchy. It’s not that they don’t want to talk. It’s that they don’t want to talk to you. Slowly, my insecurity has crept toward mild and now pronounced paranoia, and silence has become my albatross. If I have to sit through another miserable eerie quiet brought on by a question I’ve asked at the start of class (“How are you?”/“What did you do last weekend?”/“What’s your problem?”), there’s no telling what I might do. Then, one day in a basic-level class, the meltdown.
Things began promisingly. When I first looked at the attendance sheet before class started, I was surprised and thrilled to see the name Maria Gonzales listed among all the Yoko Omimuras and Naoki Moritas. After asking around, I’d learned that she comes from Mexico and is married to a Japanese man.
“Wow…Maria Gonzales,” I said to myself with a sigh, my brain racing with exotic and stereotypical images of forbidden dances, all-night fiestas, and tequila shots passed around the classroom. It had been so long since I’d considered a name like “Maria.” It sounded so zesty, vibrant, full of life. My classes could certainly use some color, some spice, some Marrrrrrrrrria.
The only time I’d had a Mexican in my class was a few months earlier. Boy was he a stud. His name was Diego Martinez, and he couldn’t speak much English, but it didn’t really matter because none of us were listening. He had the sex appeal of several South Pacific Islands. I think the word is “smoldering.” He’d made my classroom hot to the touch. For two hours we swooned, hanging on his every mispronounced and misused word. We didn’t get much done in that class, but we all definitely learned to love Mexico.
Now, what of this Maria? Would she enter the class wearing a tight red dress, her bronze skin glimmering like gold in the artificial light, her voluptuous curves and hoop earrings swaying from side to side as she sauntered to her desk and pulled out her bright red pen, spiral notebook, and maracas? Would she bring the other students out of their shells and show them that there’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all, “so just to speak the English and dance!” Would she?
No, she wouldn’t.
I walk into the class as usual, write my name on the board, and give a bubbly, if forced, hello. There’s no answer. I turn around, face the class, and give a somewhat more aggressive, even scary hello. The students look at each other nervously.
“Hello,” a few of them mumble.
I take attendance quietly, a chance to scope out our Mrs. Gonzales. She is a pretty conservative and serious-looking woman of about fifty. But I still cling to the hope that bubbling under her stern veneer is a Mexican madwoman who is ready to party.
“How’s everyone doing?” I ask.
No answer. From anyone. Not even Maria. I realize then that the next two hours are going to be absolutely excruciating. I’m going to have to pull every answer out of them like a dentist. An evil dentist with a big pair of bloody pliers.
I decide to target people for my answers.
“How are you, Akira?”
No answer. Only fear.
“Maria?” I venture.
“Ehhhh,” she stammers. “No…me…to speak…to…on top…take…the class.”
OK, so it turns out Maria speaks the absolute worst English I’ve ever heard in my life. There will be no one to save me, after all. I’ll drown in a sea of introversion.
But though my classroom is silent, I can hear the teacher in the next room loud and clear. It’s McD, the ex-marine tough guy with a head shaped like a cardboard box. He sounds like he’s speaking into a bullhorn.
“IN AMERICAN FAST-FOOD PLACES, YOU CAN MAKE ANY ORDER BIGGER FOR AN EXTRA, LIKE, THIRTY-FIVE CENTS! THAT MEANS YOU GET MORE FRENCH FRIES AND A BIGGER DRINK! YOU CAN’T DO THAT HERE! BUT YOU CAN DO IT IN AMERICA!!”
I want to bite off my hand and throw it at someone. I feel like I’m losing my mind. My class refuses to talk to me, and the only sound bouncing around the room is McD’s ode to American fast food.
“How are you, Akira?! Eiko?! Akiko?! How are you?!”
“AND IN AMERICA, YOU CAN FILL YOUR OWN DRINK! THEY HAVE FOUNTAIN DRINK STATIONS THAT THE CUSTOMERS CAN USE TO FILL AND REFILL THEIR DRINKS! IT’S REALLY CONVENIENT! B
UT YOU CAN’T DO THAT HERE!!”
Then I lose control.
“Talk to me! Say anything!! Anything! I don’t care! Just speak! Please, speak!!” I slam the dry-erase marker onto the tray, making an embarrassingly loud noise that I immediately apologize for.
They remain silent. Maria takes notes. I excuse myself and walk out of the class to take a short breather in the teachers’ room. I sit down and inhale deeply before going back in a little calmer. This time I skip the small talk and get straight to the topic of the lesson—giving directions. Resisting the temptation to give them all directions to my ass so they can kiss it, I make it through the class, but I start having real doubts about my ability to continue this job.
Something is wrong with me. I am not the same champion teacher I was before, one who can handle the weird neuroses of his classes with grace and humor. Someone has swiped my mojo, and I need it back.
Other teachers have started to notice my slip in enthusiasm for the job.
“What’s wrong? You look nauseous,” says Grant, whose limitless gusto in the classroom I’ve always admired.
“I’m out of ideas,” I weep, looking down at my roster of students, fearing the worst. “I can’t bear the thought of facing another classroom full of blank stares. My self-esteem can’t take it.”
I have an advanced discussion class coming up, and I have no idea how I am going to jump-start it. So Grant tells me something he’s been doing in his classes lately.
“You should just walk in, say hello to everyone, then clap your hands together and say something like, ‘OK, someone give me a good topic to start things off with.’ Usually someone will pipe right in with something from the news or about a movie they just saw or something.”
I look at him, dubious.
“That actually works?”
“It does for me, I swear to God. But you have to make sure that your tone is the perfect mix of friendliness and authority. You can do it, I’m sure. You’re really tall.”
I’m not so sure it will work. In a perfect world, one that I’d created, someone would suggest something like “bad TV shows” or “hideous fashion trends” or maybe even “most unique forms of suicide.” But this is far from a perfect world.
Grant senses my apprehension.
“Listen, in a discussion class like that, there’s always at least one person who wants to talk himself silly. If all else fails, just sidle up to that student and ask him for a suggestion. Once they’re forced to speak, they’ll give you something good you can use. Then you should clap your hands again and say, ‘OK, everyone please get together with the person next to you and talk on this subject for three minutes, then we’ll all come back together and share stories.’”
I look down at my list of students. All the usual suspects. Shizue and Takehiro, an old married couple, both in their seventies, who lived in England a long time ago and still take English class together once a week. There’s Kumiko, a college student who checks herself in her pocket mirror at least six times every class. There’s sweet Kayoko, a young travel agent who looks exactly like Minnie Mouse. And Tomo, a surly, aloof, soon-to-graduate high school senior who is intensely obsessed with J. D. Salinger. But there’s one name on the roster I’ve never seen before. Naomi. Hmm. She could be just the wild card I need. I decide to take Grant’s advice.
I walk in, say hello, write my name and the class number on the board as always, clap my hands, and say, “OK, let’s get started. Someone give me a good topic.”
Silence. A tumbleweed rustles past the open door.
“Anything’s OK, you guys. Someone just give me an interesting topic.”
I look around the room at each student. The students look around the room at each other and then me. I feel a lip wobble coming on.
Just when I’m about to collapse on the floor at Kayoko’s feet and offer her money just to recite her ABCs, Naomi the new student chimes in. She is very slim and stylishly dressed and has the severe facial angles of a hard-nosed businesswoman or perhaps a television executive. The world seems to hang off her cheekbones. She also has a blank, completely unreadable expression on her face. She could have just killed someone, or she could have just baked a chocolate cake. Who knows? She is a femme fatale, a Japanese Marlene Dietrich, and a stunning contrast to the rest of the class, which is stubbornly cute. Naomi, in her charcoal-gray pinstriped pantsuit, occupies a world of her own, one of film noire ambiance, long white cigarettes, and women in dark glasses with secrets for sale. Yeah, like that.
“You said anything is OK, right?” she asks in a husky voice.
Now, that is a dangerous question in this job, one that can lead down paths you’d rather not tread. But there’s no saying no to a dame with this much moxie. I want to hear what she has to say. Plus, she’s the only one offering to speak. So I nod and say, “Sure.”
“Well,” she intones enigmatically in nearly flawless English, “I was reading the newspaper this morning, and it was interesting, an article I read. It was about a group of women who were drinking in a bar, and they saw a guy and, how do I say, surround him and make him to take his clothes off and they assault him.”
I look around uncomfortably at the pensioners in the class, poor Shizue and normally unflappable Takehiro, but it is impossible to read their expressions. Tomo, the catcher in the rye, looks at Naomi and rolls his eyes like he’s never seen such a total phony in his life. I look back at Naomi and brace myself for the rest of her story.
“At their court, they were punished, but it was much less than if the same thing was done by men to a woman. I thought that was interesting.” She smiles in the manner of Cruella De Ville.
I ask her, “Do you think their punishment should have been more severe?”
“I’m sorry, severe, what means severe?”
“Harsh, serious,” I explain. “Occasionally merciless, inhuman, or brutal.”
She pauses and looks around the class that she holds transfixed.
“No,” she says with a giggle and another quick look around the classroom, gauging the reaction.
Wow. Now here is a woman who clearly likes to bait people. Japanese folks are generally quite loath to speak about contentious topics like, say, public sexual assault. Naomi-san is obviously not. What she wants, it is becoming increasingly apparent, is to get a reaction from her fellow countrymen.
She is a troublemaker. A breath of fresh air. I love her. I am afraid of her.
“OK, anyone have a comment?” I ask. No one has a comment. I am uncomfortable because, even after teaching over two million lessons, I still never know exactly how to read a class of Japanese students. They like to preserve the appearance that nothing is wrong, while underneath that polished surface likely lurks irritation, fear, loathing, dread, and/or arousal.
I don’t feel comfortable giving the class this topic to discuss for three minutes and report back on. Naomi wouldn’t mind, but I will not fall into her trap, no, no, no. As much as I appreciate her left-field suggestion, we will talk about civilized things in this class, like good ways to stay cool in the hot Tokyo summer or favorite amusement park rides. Not reverse-gender gang rape. Definitely not reverse-gender gang rape.
“OK, great, thank you, Naomi. Anyone else have an interesting topic?” Shizue quickly comes through with the lifesaving—if boring—suggestion of favorite restaurants in Tokyo. The next three minutes go by without a hitch.
After this warm-up activity, I broach the topic of the first hour of the lesson, which, in our appalling textbook, is “Expressing Thanks.” Now, the good thing about these high-level classes is that, once the class gets warmed up, the students should be doing most of the talking, making the teacher’s role that of advisor and confidante. Just give them some things to discuss and let ’em go. But don’t be fooled. It’s harder than it sounds. After all, these students have taken a lot of lessons by the time they reach this level. So the threat of repeating an activity that a student has done recently with another teacher is very real. T
here’s nothing worse than being informed by a student, “We talked about our most embarrassing moment in my last class.”
I pair them up and then write a few questions on the board to give them something to talk about: “What is something that someone did for you recently that you really appreciated? How did you show your thanks?”
Innocent enough questions. I envision answers involving taxi drivers who are nice enough to help their passengers get their heavy bags to their apartment on the second floor or young boys helping old women pick up the change they dropped at the station ticket machine. They all begin talking, and I sit my chair in the middle of the small classroom and begin listening in on what they’re saying.
Shizue is telling Kumiko about her husband cleaning his own rice bowl the night before, while Takehiro sings the praises of a shop assistant who was so instrumental in helping him choose the right suit (and, consequently, relieving him of about a hundred thousand yen).
Naomi is partnered with the aforementioned Minnie Mouse look-a-like, Kayoko, who in every class is sweetness and light, always has a smile for everyone, and always wears extremely fashionable shoes. Naomi eyes her with suspicion and annoyance; might she feel the need to shake up her world and rearrange it a little bit?
“So,” Kayoko begins, gesturing to the question that I wrote on the board, “what is something that someone did for you recently that you really appreciated?”
The whole class is alive with broken English conversations, but I have my ear pricked in the direction of Cruella and Minnie, dying to hear what they’ll come out with.
“Well,” Naomi begins. Ideally, at this point, the lights would dim, the spotlight would cast its dramatic glow, the strings would begin to flutter, the rest of the room would fall silent, the saxophone would sing, and Naomi would take center stage, a Benson and Hedges Deluxe Ultra Light 100 poised between her fingers, ready to tell the cold, cruel world her story. Thankfully, none of this happens, because her chosen subject is even less appropriate than I could have ever possibly hoped.