|
Knife!
The following is a collection of mostly brief notes I jotted down beginning
in January '98. Perhaps that's a good title for it: "A Collection of
Mostly Brief Notes" and deliver it at a Japanese conference. Or maybe I
could call it "Freak-Out in the Kanto Plain" (this area) and issue my own
"manga" versions to be filed away on the greasy shelves of ramen and
yaki-tori restaurants. Or write it up in some tabloid as "Storm of
Violence Blows Through Kanto Plain Terrorizing Already Sex-Crazed
Residents" but humor doesn't seem applicable here, although it is unavoidable.
The notes became a lot more topical after the series of shootings
in American schools. I think most people have the idea that Japanese
students are all well-behaved junior scholars and that schools over here
fall somewhere between being well-ordered bee-hive and more-or-less utopian
societies. Not entirely so. In fact, schools in Japan have the same
problems as do American schools. They don't have the access to guns, so the
potential for instances such as Springfield, Wyoming are greatly
diminished, however, that doesn't prevent violence with knives, which are
the popular weapon here. American schools have "No Guns!" posters.
Similar posters at my schools show a black authoritarian suit sleeve, the
hand clenched into a fist, slamming down onto a drawing of a knife with an
engraved handle. Books I read about Japan, prior to coming here did
mention ijime (bullying), but qualified this this by saying that bullying
is mostly verbal, the greatest fear being exclusion from the group. This
may have been so in the past, but such books may now be in need of some
revision. Someone get Dan Rather on the phone and let's shoot this thing,
chop chop!
January:
We had bad news this morning, replete with a sobering commentary by the
principal during the morning meeting. An English teacher in the Tochigi
prefecture (state) next to Gunma (our prefecture) was stabbed to death in
class yesterday after she scolded a thirteen-year-old 7th grader for coming
to class ten minutes late. She had just returned to work from maternity
leave. An awful thing, as bad or worse than the Kobe Kid incident last
year, since it was witnessed by all the other kids in the class. This is
a first for Japan,
although I hear that a teacher was fatally attacked 18 years ago.
And then, a series of violent altercations took place.
Two days later a junior high school student in the same prefecture left
school after third period, visited a cutlery shop briefly, returned to
school and stuck a knife into a girl. She has recovered.
Two days later another junior high school student in Tokyo approached a
police officer and asked if he could hold his sidearm. When the officer
said no, the boy flashed a knife, and, before the officer had a chance to
react, stabbed the bullet proof vest. Not injured.
Four days later a high school teacher in the Tochigi prefecture was shot in
the street by sniper armed with a BB-Gun.
It's my last day at S-chu where even the bad students are practically
harmless. When one K-sensei (sensei means teacher) announces to the class
that I've reached the end of my six-week at their school and I'm moving on
to X-chu, one student remarks that he hopes I'll be alright, since "the
student's at that school are pretty rough."
In fact at a speech tournament several weeks before B-sensei had warned me
that in fact they have been having some troubles at X-chu and the worst
thing is that the trouble-makers are ichi-nen-sei (first year students).
"By the time these students become san-nen-sei (third-year-students) I
think that this school will be on the front pages of the newspapers," he
said, adding that he's hoping for a transfer this year. He's been trying
to get transfered to a school in his own city for four years now.
So, I've only been in school for a week before I see the problems. Several
of these new students are really bad. P-sensei who is an okay teacher, but
who hasn't got the slightest idea how to handle trouble(ed) students has
let two students ruin over her lecture and class activities two classes in
a row, and I'm watching it happen a third when I decide, alright this is
bullshit, and
five minutes early, tell P- "this class is over. Dismiss the class now. I
want to talk to that student and that student up here right now." "Is
there a problem?" she asks. "Well, yes. In case you hadn't noticed, he's
been completely rude since class started. He's done everything he could to
distract the other students. He didn't even have his book out. His desktop
was completely empty except for that red cloth he was playing with all hour
and he was speaking non-stop straight through your lecture and our
dialogue, and was wrestling during the class activity. When you tried to
take the red cloth away from him he wouldn't give it to you, and when you
turn around he flung it at you. I'd call that a problem. And this is the
third time this has happened." So Kobayashi, a short pug-faced punk
steps forward and I say to him in some broken Japanese and through
P-sensei's translation, "P-sensei worked hard to prepare a lesson
plan for this class. Why are you making her job difficult?" "Shirimasen.
(I don't know.)" I say, "Watashi mo shirimasen (I don't know either)." He
says something, but all I understand is "atama no naka" (inside my head).
"What?" "He says something in his head is broken." The other kid,
Negishi, is standing off to one side now. Strangely, he has hung around
without being asked just to watch. "And this student," I say "Was throwing
sharp metal stars across the room. If you look around the room you'll see
them all over the floor. Negishi is a taller that Kobayashi, stocky and
unlike the somewhat confessional and more intelligent Kobayashi, is only
standing with a stupid leering expression. What an idiot! He's still holding a
handful of the "throwing stars." P-sensei demands the stars and he
refuses. She tries prying his hand open and he clenches it shut leering
idiotically. I can see where this is going so I say, "Forget it, we'll
deal with him later." I have P-sensei tell both of them that if this
happens again, I will not return to their classroom." And nobody wants
that to happen, since it's either me or the textbook and I know that at
least most of the time I'm at least more interesting than that.
That's what I did a year before when Douchi, another bad student and the
son of a local Yakuza gangster, was getting out of line. Since the rest of
the students in that class blamed him for the absence their
American friend and applied peer-pressure. Reverse-ijime (ijime is
bullying.) Well I like Douchi. He has a sense of humor at least, unlike
these two ill-humored malcontents and he pulled it together and acted as
the conductor of the ni-nen-seis' (2nd graders) choir during last the
graduation ceremony last year.
Kobayashi promises to do better next time, but Negishi only mutters
something under his breath leaves. After P-sensei's class, I am asked to
write a long report on what I observed during the last three classes. My
report includes an account of the two students' behavior and my assessment
of their state of mind. It is translated into Japanese and read by the
principal, the vice, the head-teacher and the students' home-room teacher.
And the more the they all thanked me for taking the trouble, the more, I
wished that I'd never agreed to write the damn thing. Reports are stupid.
My these approach to these kinds of problems approach is to handle things
directly as I'd done in the classroom. I'd only mentioned the incident
when after returning to the teachers' room and J-sensei said I looked
frustrated.
Perhaps Kobayashi's repentance doesn't last long, or maybe it was someone
else. Three days later I see the custodian and a teacher carrying a bent
up metal door downstairs. It's actually bent concave as though kick and
kicked hard about twenty times. Doing that kind of damage is pretty
difficult with school slippers. No one saw it happen; teachers heard loud
noises, but by the time they arrived all they found was this beat up door.
Well, things could be worse. In nearby Azumamura, the bosozoku bike gangs
sometimes ride their bikes between the wings of the school building during
class, and one A.E.T. from New Zealand lives in a village, where the
students have been known to ride their motorbikes down the corridor. It
hasn't come to that yet, but Kobayashi and his fellow future bozosoku
(petty-organized crime motorcyle thugs) cohorts have two more years to go.
At Mr. J's wedding reception I am seated next to Mr. W. After a few
drinks he tells me that he heard a noise last week some shouting in the
foyer. He rushed out to see what was the matter. Douchi was pulling Mr. G
(the youngest teacher) by his necktie violently jerking it this way and
that. Mr. G was trying to extricate himself, but didn't have a chance, and
Douchi was really pissed about something. Mr. W later advised Mr. G to
"Dress like me. Don't wear a tie and you can't be pulled around."
So the "killer chu-gaksei (j.h.s. student)" as my high school private
student Emi-chan calls him, got sent to some reform school, since the
judicial system and most folks in general aren't sure what to do with him.
Enter: a dozen or so tv specials or newspaper articles generated
discussions about what to do about it.
Two days later another A.E.T. tells me that a student smashed his
teacher's head into the blackboard when she wasn't looking, because she had
confiscated the student's pocketbell (cellular phone) after someone called
him during class.
March:
And so now I've returned to X-chu again. It's my first day here and
I've been told that Douchi is the new public enemy number one. It seems
that he and a friend of his were on their way home and passing by the
nearby park, decided to stop and have some sport with a couple of the 2nd
graders they noticed. A neighbor called the police and Douchi and his
friend were nabbed. Of course. The two second graders had to go to a
doctor and it was necessary for them to sit out a week. Now, Douchi is
sitting on the
front steps of the school looking very concerned. The police are going to
call today and ask him to come in again. He doesn't want to go to class,
so he's out there now, thinking about his actions. He doesn't need this
kind of trouble right now, because he's taking his high school exams next
week. Actually most kids like him don't even bother taking the exams and
wind up working at a gas station or worse; in fact, becoming a gas station
attendant is one of the nicer things that can happen to high school
drop-outs in Japan. His father, the Yakuza guy is pissed that he will have
to pay money to the 2nd grade boys' families for doctors bills and has
undoubtedly been making life uncomfortable at home. His father's so ketchi
(stingy) that he refuses to pay for school lunch, even though it's
well-known he can afford it (but if Yakuza members don't want to do
something, they usually make it clear that they don't want to do it, and
then they are not asked again. Besides, they're used to people giving them
money). If Douchi can just pass his exam and get into a high school . . .
he'll either straighten out or become the terror of the other high school
students. T-sensei says Douchi doesn't need to worry about high-school
though, because he'll never make a high enough score.
March Tenth:
J-sensei ran into today, grabbed a few papers, mentioned something
about having to go to the gym where the students are practicing their song
for our graduation ceremony, hands me this morning's Daily Yomiuri and runs
off, returning twice for wasuremono (forgotten things).
Intending to head straight for the currency exchange rate, I spot on
the front page, "TEEN STABBING: A thirteen-year-old schoolboy dies after
being
stabbed by a student of the same age in a Saitama Prefecture junior high."
Saitama is the prefecture just to the east of Gunma. I can ride my
bike there in about an hour on the bike path.
I ask Mr. B, who also teaches the Moral Education class, if he read
the news, and he tells me that he heard about it on the radio this morning
on the way to work. Then he adds, "In this school, last Monday, a couple
of days before you came here from Ue-chu we had such an incident. A
student with a knife was chasing another student down the hallway shouting
'I'll kill you.'"
"That's terrible!" I say, genuinely disturbed--this is the first
time I've heard of one of my students bringing a weapon to school. "It's
getting worse every month, you know." I'm wondering now, how many of my
students have knives in their desks. "Was the student a troublemaker or
had he been the victim of ijime (bullying)?"
"He was just a normal student. But these days students don't know
how to control their anger. Some people say that these kids were born the
same year that video games began. I don't know. Parents today treat their
children like cats. Dogs are kept on a leash, but cats run free to do what
they want."
I choose not to address this strange analogy and ask, "What
happened to the student?"
"Oh, he ran away. He wasn't hurt."
"No, I mean what happened to the student with the knife?"
"Well, he was laughed at."
"The student's laughed at him when he pulled out a knife? That
seems strange. But I mean, how was the student punished."
"No, he was laughed at, then he pulled the knife. After that, we
talked to the student."
"Is that all?"
"Well, we took away the knife, of course."
"Oh good thinking, but I think with all the recent news that it
should be handled a little more seriously. I think the student should be
suspended."
"Yes, we think so too, but the parents will become angry if he do
this, and they can't understand why their son should be stopped from coming
to school. And they'll complain."
"So, they'll complain. What difference does that make? Aren't
there laws about this kind of thing? Don't the students have a right to be
in a safe environment."
"So you think that we should have a policeman here?"
I laugh. "I just think that Kocho-sensei (kocho means principal)
should exercise his authority before something awful happens in this
school. But Japanese people are so afraid of excluding someone from the
group that they would rather let a dangerous situation continue than
suspend a student.
It is more complex than that, though. The question of what to do
with such a student is maybe not so simple. So a student had a knife.
Well, he was a victim of bullying, and otherwise an average student. Would
anyone be served by suspending him, while letting the abusive students
stay? On the other hand, statistically are bullies the kind of students
who kill other students or do they abuse only up to a point; and or are
"killer-students" the kind of people who, unlike the more calculating
bullies, suddenly explode with rage.
"By the way, why did that student become so angry?" I ask B-sensei.
"Why were the other students laughing at him?"
"Oh yes, well, he was in the toilet when the bell rang even though,
eto, how should I say, he was eto (uhm) not finished doing, so he put his
pants back on and went to class but there was his things [feces] falling
out of his pant legs and when he sat down the students complained of a bad
smell and it was very easy to tell which student it was, because his 'unko'
(feces) was on the
floor, leading to his desk. So the some of the students laughed at him and
the student who was laughing the loudest--you remember Negishi. It was
him. And the student chased Negihsi yelling, 'I'm not so weak! I'll kill
you!'"
Enter Sam Donaldson. Rather couldn't make it, so we threw Sam a bone.
Cookie Mueller wouldn't even talk to us. "Where or when does this kind of
behavior get it's programming. Elementary school I think. I've visited
elementary schools on numerous occasions and I never fail to notice how
little direction the children are given. Until and throughout 6th grade
Japanese children are allowed to do almost anything. Then at thirteen the
awful reality of junior high life. Now there are teachers that seem to
specialize in yelling, and up until very recently corpeal punishment was
still common in some of the more rural schools. I think alot of it has to
do with this snap to attention at thirteen and fourteen. With no
experience in how to deal with not being able to do anything and in fact
having to spend a lot of time sitting and listening and taking notes from
overworked run-down teachers so that in three years you can take a test
that will decide what your parameters are for the rest of your life. Some
people can't handle a situation like that at any age. And, of course, when
you're the son of a local mafia thug you can't forget you've got an image
to uphold. But some people say it's because Sega World is so near the
school."
[to be continued in an anticlimactic part two]
|
|
