It was Saturday afternoon. I stepped off the train and surveyed the empty platform.
I checked my watch. I was on time.
I checked my clothes. I had kept my word and was wearing my newly acquired shorts and T-shirt.
I looked around again. I detected movement up ahead. Chie’s face ducked out from behind a station pillar.
I smiled. She was being playful and hiding from me.
I approached the pillar slowly. Chiiieeee?’ I called teasingly.
Chie leapt out. ‘Ta-daa,’ she announced proudly.
I gasped in bewilderment. ‘What do you think?’ she asked expectantly. She pirouetted in front of me and stepped back so I could admire her attire properly.
Words caught in my throat. ‘Aaahhh … you look … you look …’
‘Just like you!’ Chie finished the sentence for me. ‘Don’t I look cute?’
‘I don’t know what to say.’ I looked around quickly, hoping desperately that no one had seen us together. Chie Matsumoto was wearing exactly the same pair of shorts and T-shirt that I was. To an uninformed observer, we would look like a pair of nutty simpletons.
Chie leapt into my unenthusiastic arms and kissed my cheek excitedly. ‘I’m so glad you like it. I think we look great together. We look like such a happy couple.’
A happy couple of morons, I thought to myself. What on earth was going on?
‘Ha,’ I said. ‘This is a surprise, Chie. Did you want us to wear the same clothes today, or did you forget what I would be wearing?’
Chie giggled happily. ‘I knew, I knew. I planned this all along. After I bought you your clothes last week, I secretly went back to the store and bought myself the same things. I wanted to surprise you. What do you think?’
Chie stepped back and performed her pirouette again. I grimaced. Not only was she dressed in the same clothes as me, but in her haste she had chosen a pair of shorts that were almost the same size as mine. To stop the legs dragging on the ground, she had been forced to pull the shorts up to her chest, where they were clamped tightly around her body with a brown leather belt. The effect was of a pair of spacesuit trousers ballooning out below her breasts and hanging down limply to her shins. A similarly over-sized T-shirt drooped from her small shoulders.
‘You look … aaahh … You don’t happen to have a change of clothes with you?’
Chie’s smile vanished immediately. ‘Don’t you like this? I wanted to surprise you? Don’t you like it?’
I smiled gingerly. ‘No, I think it looks very nice. It’s a big surprise, trust me. My friends will also be surprised when I tell them about it.’
‘Oh good,’ Chie chirped, her smile returning. ‘I can’t wait to meet your friends.’
‘Trust me,’ I assured her, ‘they would love to have seen you today. I can just imagine their happy reactions.’
‘Oh good!’ Chie clapped her hands together. ‘Let’s go,’ she exclaimed, racing off ahead. ‘Harvest Hill here we come.’
I shook my head in disbelief. At what point in our relationship had Chie quietly lost her sanity? What on earth was going wrong with my screening process for potential girlfriends? Why did I only ever seem to attract weirdos?
I plodded slowly after my look-alike girlfriend and her baggy space pants. Harvest Hill turned out to be a large theme park and picnic area, modelled on the Japanese idea of a New Zealand farmyard. It was full to bursting with stores selling ‘Hello Kitty’ merchandise, a German beer hall, banjo music on loudspeakers, and a sheep show.
Two young men, Matt from Waimate and Ryan from Christchurch, were up on stage. For the first time since being in Japan, I was made to feel truly embarrassed by my New Zealand heritage. Matt was a tough country guy who glared at the audience and had obviously been doing the show so long that he had come to hate Japan, life and the human race.
Ryan, meanwhile, managed to smile occasionally at the audience, which was nice of him, but when he tried to speak Japanese I wanted to cut my ears off. In his ten-minute introductory speech, he managed to mispronounce every syllable of every word. I looked around at the audience. They were studying their shoes.
‘What’s he talking about?’ Chie asked with a confused look.
‘He’s introducing himself,’ I explained. ‘His Japanese is a little incorrect though.’
‘He’s speaking Japanese?’ Chie blinked in surprise.
Ryan’s awkward introduction came to an end and the audience sighed with relief. It was now time for the sheep show to begin; we settled in to observe life on a New Zealand farm. Matt glared at the audience, yelled at Bess the dog to ‘fucking well get up on stage’, and swore when the sheep got out of their stall before his cue. Two sheep went AWOL and were never rounded up. The rest of the straggly flock were moved three metres to the next pen, and Matt swore at them until they went through the gate.
Next, Matt hauled a sheep up on stage and proceeded to shear it, a task for which he seemed wholly ill-equipped. As the ragged old sheep got cut and started bleeding, some children in the audience began to sob loudly. Undeterred, Matt told the poor creature to ‘stop fucking moving’ and ‘sodding well quiet down’.
And then, to my relief, the show was over. There was a timid smattering of applause and several children continued to cry. Ryan called out goodbye and then, instead of politely inviting the audience to come and take photos with him and the sheep, ordered them up on stage in crude Japanese. I quickly raced away before anyone could associate me with Harvest Hill, or misidentify me as a psychotic New Zealand farmer.
‘I had such a great day with you today.’ Chie smiled lovingly. We were sitting in a fast-food restaurant, wearing our matching outfits. Chie’s shorts were hitched up under her arms.
‘It was certainly a new experience for me,’ I admitted.
‘Oh, I’m soooo happy with you,’ Chie said sweetly. ‘I can’t wait until we’re living together in New Zealand. I think we will be together forever and ever.’
Oh, dear Lord. I gagged on my hamburger and started coughing violently. ‘Pardon?’
‘I said I can’t wait until we are living together in Christchurch. We can have fun days like this all the time.’
I slurped some Coca-Cola. The chunk of hamburger was still stuck in my throat. Chie’s pants were hitched up under her arms. We were wearing matching outfits. And now she wanted to live with me forever and ever. Why, oh why, had I taken her out to the Mexican restaurant in the first place?
I realised that my relationship with Chie Matsumoto needed to be terminated. Things were moving way too fast. I had known her for only five weeks, but it was only a matter of time before our entire wardrobes were matching.
I decided to let her down gently. Slowly but surely I spent less and less time with her, until at last I was brave enough to send a gently worded email suggesting it would be best if we parted company.
In Chie’s defence, her slightly deranged fashion sense had been a misguided attempt at creating a group identity for us. Being part of a group is an overriding aspect of Japanese society. From an early age, children are sternly taught to conform to group culture and ways of thinking. To express an opinion different to that of your classroom group will soon result in social rejection. To be seen as being too intelligent or too stupid, too tall or too short, too fat or too thin will eventually have disastrous consequences. Nobody wants to be different, an outsider left on their own and quietly shunned by their peers.
Mr Doi had achieved this within weeks of his arrival at Kanan Junior High School. There was now no way for him to be welcomed into lunchtime conversations, after-school drinking sessions and staffroom events. That was, of course, if he ever decided to return to work.
Group mentality extended to the sports field. The students in the school’s baseball team shaved their heads and adopted a ‘tough guy’ swagger. The boys in the basketball team were outspoken and cocky. The girls in the tennis team were cute and giggly, while those in the music club were quiet and shy. Even t
hough participation in each of these activities required a certain skill-set, and often a matching personality as well, group consciousness seemingly highlighted and reinforced these stereo-types, and behaviour patterns were altered in order to fit in.
Fashion also served to reinforce your place in a group. School or office uniforms were a badge of honour and showed you had a place within society, a place within a group.
Chic young women sporting matching designer handbags and virtually identical (usually Italian) clothing would parade through town, their gear proudly proclaiming that they were trendy, wealthy, and part of a like-minded group of friends. Even rebels wore group clothing. Punk rockers sported pink Mohicans and gothic girls wore black lacy dresses. These ‘free spirits’ would hang out in groups of similarly attired friends. Nobody wanted to be alone.
Fourteen-year-old Megumi Uchida was a prime example of what could go wrong when one dared oppose group mentality. She stood in the middle of the staffroom, tears streaming down her face. Her mascara had painted black smears down her swollen cheeks. Everyone was yelling at her.
Megumi was a third-grade student. She was slightly taller than her female peers and also a little plump, making her an easy outcast in such an image-conscious society. Alas, though, poor Megumi was a hopeless romantic and dreamed of one day finding a boyfriend. To attract the attention of her male classmates, she had daringly come to school wearing mascara and a touch of lip gloss.
Sadly for her, this simple act of self-decoration was considered akin to a criminal offence at conservative Kanan Junior High School. Make-up allowed students to make themselves ‘different’, and so was strictly prohibited. Megumi had been sentenced to parade around the staffroom, stopping at every desk so the teacher could give her a ten-minute telling-off.
During such events, my desk was always bypassed as there was no way I would be able to convincingly scold anyone in Japanese. I retreated to a chair by the computer terminal and kept my head down. Megumi had so far made it past only three desks, had been slapped twice, was sobbing pitiably, and no-one had thought to give her a tissue.
Slap! I looked up. Megumi was being sent back to desk two, as Mrs Otani had something further to say. I began to wonder if the poor girl was going to make it home that evening.
I returned to my emails and tried to think of happy stories to tell my family. Forty minutes later poor Megumi was finally taken away to the ‘conversation room’ for the remainder of her sentence, which would last another two hours. It was safe for me to return to my desk.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The crisis had been averted. Megumi Uchida had learnt her lesson and would never again wear makeup to school. Order had been reinstated.
Two weeks later, however, a new threat to group harmony suddenly reared its head. The staffroom was thrown into turmoil. There was a new student in the school: Yurika Yurano.
Everyone referred to Ms Yurano by her surname, and this single word seemed to have a terrifying effect whenever it was uttered. The reason was that Ms Yurano had bleached blonde hair, like a Simpsons’ character.
I quickly took refuge at the internet terminal and set up a makeshift bomb shelter with supplies of Coca-Cola and steamed pork buns. I waited: World War Three was on its way.
To my astonishment, however, Ms Yurano was allowed to go to class and display her bright yellow hair in peace. Mr Higo explained the teachers’ predicament. It seemed that Ms Yurano had an interesting family background, so interesting in fact that the teachers were completely at a loss as to how to deal with her. I made an educated guess that her father was somehow involved in organised crime, and hence Ms Yurano was not to be yelled at, beaten, slapped, and pushed around as anyone else would have been.
As well as having a mafia dad, Yurika Yurano was taller than any of the boys at the school, and almost the same height as me. This made the short male teachers, who usually didn’t hesitate to give a female student a good slap, think twice before even raising their voices. Furthermore, Yurika’s ten earrings, Barbie-doll make-up and extremely short skirt all served to strike fear into the heart of my colleagues.
There were, nevertheless, a few teachers still bold enough to attempt to reprimand her. The week after Yurika arrived I was walking along the hall-way behind her when a short, fierce man leapt out of a classroom and yelled the equivalent of, ‘Oi, you there, what are you doing? Walk properly!’
I was fairly convinced that Ms Yurano had been walking normally. She, too, must have realised she had been the target of unjustified criticism. She turned defiantly and proceeded to strut her stuff, flicking her hips so her miniscule skirt bounced up and down, and the boys sitting on the floor got a clear view of her underwear. The short male teacher rapidly retreated, and the boys squirmed.
Lamentably, I was allowed little opportunity to get to know the school’s newest member as Ms Yurano repeatedly bunked English class, claiming she had little interest in the subject. However, while walking past my classroom one day, she popped her bright yellow head through the open window, gave me the glad eye, winked, and continued on her way.
The teachers, meanwhile, continued to hold emergency meetings every day to discuss what should be done. This continued for several weeks and, as no course of action was decided on, the spirit of Ms Yurano slowly started to spread. Other girls began to strut provocatively in the hallways, shorten their skirts and give people the glad eye. Rebellion was in the air.
Unfortunately, I was far too busy to dye my hair green or pierce my eyebrows. For the first time in two years and two months in Japan, I finally had a full workload: stacks of first-grade speaking tests to mark, a town magazine article to write, and board games to create for the young minnows. I was forced to stay at school later than 4.30 and even spent a Sunday afternoon working on the magazine article.
Gone were my two-hour-long coffee breaks and extended trips to the convenience store. Gone were the days of being able to read an entire paper back novel in a single afternoon. My carefully ordered pen collection fell into disarray.
In the midst of a society that prides itself on hard work, it was wonderful to at last feel productive and involved in the staffroom ‘group’.
After a slight reshuffle in the staffroom seating arrangements, I found myself sitting next to the new woodwork teacher. Mr Yagi was twenty-two years old and now held the esteemed title of youngest teacher in the school. He had a shaved head, a black rap-star T-shirt, and, in keeping with the current rebellious spirit, wore his baseball cap back to front.
I was delighted with the school’s choice of replacement woodwork teacher, and Mr Yagi and I rapidly became good friends. One day, however, my bubble burst: Mr Yagi sadly informed me that magnificent Mr Doi had not been fired and was still considered a member of the staff. He was currently undergoing ‘job retraining and counselling’, and once he’d been given the all-clear he would return. With the new seating arrangements, I could look forward to sitting next to Mr Doi forever. I prayed that his processing would take a very long time.
My run of happy classes with the young minnows continued as the summer months ticked by. Hiro, Yurika and Teru-Chan were now big fans of Cluedo and Snap, but I was keen to try something new before their interest waned. I stayed late at school for a solid fortnight, armed with an array of felt-tip pens, coloured paper, sheets of cardboard, sloppy glue and a rusty stapler. The end result was a lovingly created imitation of the classic board game Who’s Who?
I had painstakingly produced four matching cardboard game boards. On each I had drawn a variety of faces encased within small cardboard windows. Each player drew a card from a pack. This portrayed the player’s identity, and corresponded to a picture on the game board.
Players then took turns asking each other questions to guess their opponent’s secret identity: ‘Do you have blue eyes?’ ‘Do you have glasses?’ ‘Do you have long hair?’
If a response were affirmative, the faces without the corresponding features would be ‘checked off’ by c
losing ingenious little cardboard window-shutters, which were then sealed with little latches made of staples. The players would continue to ask each other questions, until by a slow process of elimination they could deduce their opponent’s identity.
As I am no artist, drawing fifty little faces with unique features was quite a struggle. I had managed to draw only five before I realised that my cartooning abilities were limited. Each face had started to look like the previous one – a round head, scraggly hair, googly eyes and a small hook nose. Try as I might, I could not seem to draw anything different.
I resorted to copying faces out of comic books and magazines. This did the trick, and I proudly displayed the four handsome game boards to my bemused colleagues. Mr Kazama, the principal, pored over them intently. ‘Ooohh,’ he exclaimed joyfully, ‘it’s so bright and colourful. Ooohh, and look, the little windows have little latches!’ He clapped his hands and called for the vice principal to come and inspect my work.
The minnows were completely blown away. Yurika peered happily at the little faces, Hiro fiddled with the window latches, and Teru-Chan inspected the stack of ‘identity’ cards, gruffly inquiring as to whether this was a new game of Snap.
I explained the rules, and we had a practice run. Debate soon flared as to whether red hair could be considered blond or not. Teru-Chan was adamant that it could, and I suddenly realised that Hiro was colour-blind and thought that a quarter of the faces on the board had green hair.
We struggled on with a second practice round and the students slowly got the hang of things. The bell rang and they made me promise I would bring Who’s Who? to the next lesson so we could have a proper competition.
Group harmony was now fully restored to the young minnows’ class.
Group harmony was also very much alive and well during my fortnightly conversation sessions with my mothers. Over the past year we had discussed all manner of things – local weather patterns, festivals, favourite recipes, gardening tips, parents-in-law, children, grandchildren, Kanan Junior High School, Mr Doi, and my life in New Zealand.
Under the Osakan Sun Page 25