painty gibbon paint paint
The term is winding down now so during my Elementary school visit this week there were no English classes scheduled, because you know, they need the end of term reserved for classes that actually matter.
Thankfully though, my Elementary school is all for integrating me with the kids outside of the English class - I join in their sentaku classes (the classes that the kids choose, ie. boys go and do P.E. whilst girls do cooking class. A gold star to the person who figures out what I usually do) eat with them during lunch, and somewhat apathetically play ‘punch the gaijin right in the fricking nuts’ with them during lunch break etc etc.
The teachers explained to me that today, I would be doing Shuuji with the children. Shuuji is basically ‘writing practice’ and is similar to Shodou (Japanese calligraphy), the difference being that Shodou is an actual art form, and Shuuji is just something you do in school. Both however, are the type of thing that look really easy to do but are in fact soul-crushingly difficult to be any good at. I can write Japanese characters just fine with a pen or pencil, but Shuuji requires a certain deftness of paintbrush ability that I sorely lack. I don’t know what it is with me and paintbrushes - maybe I was raped by a paintbrush as a child - but I have never been very good at using them. I remember in secondary school art class I would draw some rather impressive pencil drawing only to sigh, defeated at my own crapness when it came to painting over the pencil and creating the kind of image that is embarrassingly unrecognisable as an evolution of the original. The kind that Van Gogh might have painted if, instead of cutting his ear off, he poured acid all over his face, shouted “I’M A BIG RED FIRETRUCK!” and jumped head first out of a 5th storey window onto a sword made of bees.
So with this apprehension coursing in my veins and trying to force its way out of my rectum, I walked into the class to find that, to my horror, the teacher had set up a chair for me at the front, next to where she stands, turned round so that it was FACING the students. This meant that at any point in time 30 little heads would be watching my every move, waiting for me to make some monumental cock up like a single mistake in a stroke that turns the Japanese character meaning “happiness” into one meaning “satan death death transvestite rabbit whore”.
Luckily though, these were 3rd year kids (around 9 years old) which meant they weren’t heavily into kanji (the Chinese characters used by the Japanese language) in their Shuuji studies - most of the lesson was simple word practice in hiragana, which is one of the Japanese phonetic alphabets, in which the characters are very simple to write. “Pah! This will be piss easy” I thought, as I gripped the brush with all the finesse of a dead manatee and proceeded to gingerly demolish the entire institution of penmanship with every awkward brush stroke.
Almost in direct contrast to the soft, gentle curves of the example characters, my ink-drowned brush was creating awful, blotchy character-like shapes - just BEGGING to be laughed at by the kids. At that point though, I looked up and soon discovered that compared to the children, I wasn’t doing too badly. You have to remember that they were all still so young, so their handwriting even when writing normally with pens or pencils looks like mine if I try to write say, with my left hand, after about 7 pints of beer.
My efforts elicited the predictable cries of “jouzu!” from the students and teacher alike and it seemed as if I had genuinely accomplished something when I was finally able to write “niji” (rainbow) without any of the tracing guides etc. Then I realised that most of the kids were already several exercises ahead of me. Then the bell rang and I realised that I had spent an hour writing nothing but “niji” over and over again. Then I went back to the staffroom. Then I wrote this diary entry. And that brings us about up to date.
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