Run, run, run, die
The sports festival went without hitch. I cant really feel my legs today, but I think that’s a good thing. I won the 100m sprint out of my group. As I crossed the finish line, sweat pouring from every part of my body - even my eyes, hair and fingernails - I wondered to myself whether ‘the Japanese way’ would have been to let my 15yr old opponents win or to simply do my best and set an example. A wave of guilt passed over me as teachers and parents walked up to shower me with empty praise, their chants of “well done, very fast!” seeming to read “you won against a bunch of children you horrible bully, leave our country forever”.
At noon we had a lunchbreak and in keeping with the healthy living ethos that a sports festival represents, all of us teachers guzzled multiple cans of icy cold beer and smoked cigarettes in an airconditioned room whilst the children tended their mangled limbs and washed the dirt from their wilted bodies in the heat outside.
There was a small technical hitch at one point in the festival. After a few minutes of everyone looking at each other, not sure what to do, the principal decided this would be a good time for me to do an impromptu speech to the entire village. I could imagine the dialogue between him and the vice principal:
“technical hitch - we cant get the next event going for another five minutes” “Christ, what are we going to do” “I have no idea” “I know, lets get the foreign guy to do something all foreign and stupid”
So I reeled off my trademark Japanese self-introduction like the obedient parrot that I am, all the time thinking how for the audience, 5 minutes of silence would have probably been preferable over 5 minutes of hearing a gaijin butchering the Japanese language whilst straining out his mind-numbingly monotonous rhetoric about his hobbies and why he wanted to come to Japan.
