Day Fifteen

DAY FIFTEEN (06/22/08, 8:20pm)

When I woke in the morning and looked out the window, I noticed a thick layer of fog covering the valley.

After snapping a few shots, I came downstairs and was greeted by several people just sitting down to breakfast. Nope and Kazumi were eating large bowls of beef stew. I think her grandfather was eating some cold fish. Her mother had baked some homemade bread so I gladly accepted a slice of that which she served with homemade strawberry jam.

After breakfast, Kazumi and her mother brought me to her parents’ house which was just a couple houses over. It was a much older Japanese style house with dark wooden beams across the ceiling, windows with rice paper shades, and a sunken table with a depressed area beneath it for your legs. Her mother asked me many questions about schools in the US and Kazumi translated everything. Then Kazumi played a DVD she had made of her 9^th graders’ most recent field trip to Tokyo. In one scene, the children lined up for a uniform check and a teacher made sure that their coats were buttoned to the top, their cuffs were an appropriate length, they were not wearing any bright T-shirts beneath their uniforms, and they had no hair gel on. The teacher even ran his hands through one kid’s hair to make sure he didn’t have hair gel.

Later that morning, Shizuka took me to her school, about a 30-minute drive away. She teaches in a very small elementary school, fifty students total. The school is nestled up against the mountainside in a very small town. Rice paddies, some of them planted by the children, cover the hillside behind the school.

In some of the pictures, you will see us posing beside classroom paintings of people brushing their teeth. Dental hygiene seems to be a big theme in all of the schools. You would be shocked by the number of people I have seen with swollen gums, black teeth, huge overbites, and very crooked teeth. This focus on dental hygiene must be a very recent one given the state of most Japanese people’s teeth.

By the time we returned to Kazumi’s grandparents’ house, we were ready for a short nap. I curled up on the couch in my room (the bedding had already been put away), and read a few pages of Learning to Bow before my eyes drifted closed. When I woke up and went downstairs, Kazumi’s brother had just recently arrived. I only had the chance to talk to him for a few minutes before I had to pack up and leave in order to make it back to the drop of location by 4:00. Everyone stood on the porch and waved goodbye to me and Kazumi as we drove away.

On the car ride back, I savored the beautiful views and took many blurry, ill-composed pictures shot out of the window. I’ve already deleted most of them. Strangely, Kazumi’s window kept rolling down by itself. She said that Nope had left it open in the rain and it was screwed up inside. Sometimes she would have to struggle for several minutes with the switch in order to get it to close and then a minute later it would roll down again. The car felt almost haunted. On the way we exchanged contact info and talked about setting up a pen pal program between our classes. I think my students will love to write to and receive letters from Japanese kids.

We arrived at the Tanabe Community Center (our drop-off location), about forty minutes early. Kazumi sat with me and browsed through the photos I had taken while at her house. When Allan arrived, another person from my program, and we were sure that I was in the correct location, I told her she didn’t have to wait with me any longer. I knew that she had a lot of lesson planning and grading to do for the week ahead. We hugged goodbye and that was that, a fabulous weekend come to a close.

I am sitting in the lounge of a traditional Japanese Inn just outside of Tanabe, listening to a group of old men sing sappy Japanese love songs on karaoke next door in the hotel bar. I’m in my yukata (a Japanese robe), men’s sandals that the hotel provided (the women’s sandals are way too small for us Americans!), and my hair is damp with healing mineral water from the hot springs which are pumped into the public bathing rooms here. I just finished taking baths in three of the different rooms surrounded by old Japanese women. I was the only white person there, the only English speaker. With my minimal Japanese, all I could say was “good evening” as I entered a bath and “goodbye” as a left. The water felt smooth and warm, but not too hot.

Earlier this evening we had a feast fit for a king.

There must have been ten different courses to the meal, perhaps hundreds of very tiny dishes throughout the night. I don’t even want to know how much it all cost. I had the no-seafood-meal option. Among the many dishes were vegetable tempura, a salad with pork strips, a peanut-flavored, tofu-like cube, some pickled vegetables, steak with potato wedges and broccoli, a broth with beef, tofu, and mixed vegetables, miso soup, rice, cake, plum sake, and much more that I have difficulty describing. Just when we thought we were finished, another course would arrive.

I will be sleeping on another futon tonight, in a gorgeous Japanese room overlooking the ocean.

This program is absolutely amazing!