Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

The beginning of April is a time of change in Japan. Not only are the sakura slowly creating beautiful but deadly driving conditions with their moulting petals, Shingo from SMAP is changing his hair colour from off-white to a more off-colour off-white, and due to the change in weather keeping garbage in your kitchen for weeks on end has no longer become a viable option, but ALSO school teachers all over Japan receive new placements.

In Japan, all school staff unless employed directly by the board of education (like JETs) enter an annual lottery where the winning outcome is either the ruin of your comfortably stable life, or saving from the basement dungeons of devoidofmotivation-mura school where you have learned to coax students into enjoying education by way of small electric shocks and other non-lethal forms of negative reinforcement. Or somewhere in between. Or neither.

At the end of March during Spring Break, teachers enter the principal’s room one by one to have a meeting. There, he will open an envelope which contains their fate, as decided by the prefectural board of education, with the help of photographs, maps, blindfolds and darts. Teachers either stay in the same school or are given a new placement. For the teachers who have to leave, it is a time of stress and emotion.

These teachers are given nigh on 2 weeks to move all their belongings to a new house and to start a new life somewhere else in the prefecture. The leaving party for these teachers is often the last time they will see these colleagues, before they are sucked into ‘the group’ that is the next schools staff.

This year Okamura-sensei, amongst others, was given a new placement. Okamura-sensei was the only other person who smoked in the Junior High and as such we became ’smoking partners’, nipping outside during the day to have a cigarette and talk about food, proverbs, the price of cars, and other subjects that didn’t correlate fluently with each other in any way. But after months and months of this, no matter how banal our conversation, I got attached to the guy and was extremely upset to hear that he was leaving.

The flip side of this is that the school receives new teachers who are transferring from somewhere else (usually somewhere better). I also have a new neighbour, the new music teacher. Recently moved from Kumamoto-city, she didn’t have enough time to move all her stuff down and has hence been living in a completely bare house (not even a table - she had to borrow a futon and I donated an electric heater), but sort of passively accepts the unreasonably swift change in life like the overriding command of a huge faceless entity of authority that it is.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2003 at 10:29 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.