Amami School Days

When we got to Amami Oshima, it was still the rainy season, and it rained every day for a week. I would take advantage of breaks in the rivers of rain pouring down the streets to take walks around the neighborhood. I went for a walk one day around 5PM, and had to run the gauntlet of jr high kids coming home from school, bombarded with "Haroo!" "Where you from?" "Are you American?" and the accompanying tittering. It's always hard to get used to sticking out like a sore thumb, attracting attention everywhere I go.
The whole sixth grade was on the mainland on a school field trip for the week, so Theo didn't go to school the first week we were here. As a result, it's kind of a short school year for him, with only 3 weeks of school this year. This is Naze shogakko (elementary school) the same school Masami went to all those years ago (math is hard, so I'll leave it to you to figure it out). It's typical of Japanese schools, organized around a central courtyard. The older grades are on the top floors with the lower grades on the lower floors, a literal hierarchy. There are lots of stairs, and wheelchair accessibility means you're carried in your wheelchair up the stairs by your fellow classmates. As you can see, there's no grass on the school grounds, or any school or playground I have seen in Japan.
Theo goes to school from 8-4. He was on the swim team again this year, but he didn't go everyday, and not on weekends either, so it wasn't as demanding as last year, when he was jsut worn out. And we didn't have to attend the all day tournament in the grueling sun again, thank the gods!


There was a day where we were allowed to visit the classroom with the other parents before a PTA meeting. It seemed that the teacher hadn't planned anything special, not like an open house in the US or anything, so we got to see a small part of a normal school day. The kids read aloud together out of their books. (See the video at the end.) Theo says school is boring, and he doesn't know what's going on. He still enjoys hanging out with other kids, but he can't really do the work or follow along. He does do writing every night for homework, a seemingly endless chore that requires constant prodding, I mean encouraging. I suppose he's picking up something. He did say he likes the lunches (which they serve from slop buckets), especially since they give you the choice this year of avoiding natto, that slimy rotten soybean delicacy.
His teacher this year is very serious. I guess you have to be to be a teacher in Japan, as it's like the army. It's your whole life, whether you're in school or out. And there are so many extra-curricular activities, some of which we participated in, see below. Teachers are assigned a post for 3 years, they have no choice of where they work, and after three years, they are reassigned to teach somewhere else.

Masami gave a talk at a Jr. High school. I was supposed to talk in english, but Masami took up the whole time except for a few minutes. Schools here have no air conditioning, which is brutal when it's 90 degrees and the humidity is 85%. They just have these oscillating ceiling fans, which are like the Chinese water torture. The relief from the passing breeze only makes the heat seem more torturous. The stink in the schools is overwhelming, if you can imagine 500 sweaty jr high school kids. Plus they take their shoes off and change shoes to inside shoes when they enter the school. Walking past a shoe box is enough to make you swoon. As you can see, they all wear uniforms, and lines of girls alternate with lines of boys.

Yanowaki toughs

We didn't get to participate in the swim meet, but that was OK, as there were plenty other tournaments to join. Theo was in the dodgeball tournament, representing our 'hood, Yanowaki. We weren't a favorite going into the tournament, as we usually lose. The winning team gets to go to a larger tournament on the mainland, in Kagoshima (in late August after we're gone, luckily). This year, Yanowaki trounced the competition and triumphed to win the tournament. We had some ringers on our team and Theo got in some good hits. It was all over by noon, too. There was a girls' tournament, too, but they were having a hard time throwing the ball hard enough to get it over the line, much less hit anybody. There seems to be a huge difference in athletic ability between the boys and girls at this age. I wonder how much of that is cultural, as I don't see that big a difference at Theo's US school. The girls looked like they were trying unsuccessfully to play catch, while the boys looked like they were trying to knock each other's heads off.

One of the kids was wearing this shirt, which might be considered a fashion faux pas for an elementary school kid in the US.

Beware of shoes.

I got to participate in my own tournament. I was invited by our neighbor to participate in the parents' volleyball tournament. Each grade was pitted against the others. I had never played volleyball before, but after a two hour practice, I was ready to go. From what I could gather, as long as you can hit the ball with some part of your body and either get it over the net or in the vicinity of another player, you're ok. It was a good team atmosphere, with everybody giving everyone else high fives every time we made a point.

Here's me serving (like an elementary schoolgirl). At least I made it over the net. The tournament started at 8:30 AM. I was told we could go home early if we lost. Knowing how long these things can drag on, I was kind of lookng forward to losing. I got to play two games. The first one we lost. I think the other team was picking on me, as I seemed to get an inordinate amount of balls. "Hit it to the gaijin," seemed to be the strategy. Our team lost another game without me, so I didn't feel too badly. The women practiced with us, so I thought they might be on the same team, but it turns out they had their own tournament. They were vicious competitors, very unlike the elementary schoolgirls. I've never really understood why people like to watch sports, but at least watching volleyball is a lot more exciting than watching swmming, or watching people get ready to swim. The second game I played, we won by a couple of points. So although we lost the tournament, I think we did honorably, and we didn't have to commit ritual suicide (seppuku). And we got to go home after only six hours. I think the tournament is still going on.

We went to the rooftop beergarden of the tallest building in town, a 1o story hotel, to celebrate our loss. There was a nice view of the harbor and the hills as it was getting dark (the sun sets behind the hills). It was an all-you-can-eat greasy fried food and all you can drink bonanza. I mistakenly drank shochu, the local firewater made from sugarcane in fine bathtubs everywhere. Someone asked me how you translate shochu, and I just said, you don't. No one else in the world would drink the stuff, and I'm always sorry when I do.

We also had an all day school field trip to kayak in the mangrove forests with about 60 kids and their parents in two buses. I didn't think they could get all those kids into boats, but they manged to cram them in two and three to a kayak. A lot of the kids hadn't kayaked before, and in spite of some cursory directions prior to starting, some of them never got it and just paddled around in circles for an hour or kept getting stuck in the impenetrable tree roots. There were only two leaders for all of those kids, so we were a little worried about the lack of supervision. But they managed to only lose one group of kids (that we know of), and it only took them a half hour to retrieve them.

Masami arranged for the Yamato taiko drum group to come to Amami for a performance as part of the events surrounding the total solar eclipse. They came to Theo's school for a show. I had to go upstairs to the balcony to get some fresh air, as the aroma of all those little feet were making me dizzy. The drum group whipped the kids into a frenzy, as you can see in the video below. It was kind of scary.

Here they are holding up the drum while one guy beats it. They told me these drums are carved out of solid tree trunks, and their biggest drum weighs 400 kilograms.

Masami offered my services to the english teacher at the school, so I went to help out with pronunciation. It was basically reciting the alphabet and numbers. I also got to tell them about some differences between Japan and America, like the grass in schoolyards, yards and swimming pools at people's houses. They were jealous of the shorter school day. But here, the school day is taken up with a lot of maintenance, as the kids are responsible for cleaning the school and grounds, as well as other chores, like serving lunch. The writing system is incredibly difficult, too, as nobody knows all the letters (kanji). You have to know about 3000 of them to read a newspaper, so they spend much of the school day learning those. The idea of a 26 letter alphabet is very different for them. Anyway, school is over now, and Theo has time to catch up on his Nintendo DS playing. There's a lot going on here with the eclipse coming up on wednesday, so I'll write more later.

Playing a game in english class.

Group photo with 6th graders.

Class reading.

Taiko drummers.

School song.