The Skirt Police
September 9, 2015
There is more than one right way to do things. If you are living in a foreign country and are not willing to accept the above statement, you are not adjusting and should probably pack your bags and go home. Many JET ALTs spend a lot of time complaining about working life in Japan. Maybe more than they should. They talk about how unfamiliar teachers are here with Communicative Language Teaching techniques, why teachers with limited English ability are allowed in the classroom, and so on…
As a JET ALT I worked at 3 high schools every week. My base school, M.H.S. was a very low academic level school. On Wednesdays, I went to a technical high school where, I taught the same 2 classes with the same teacher every week for the first 8 months of my ALT stint -let’s call him M-sensei. After a time, we developed a congenial rapport that comes from working closely together. I looked forward to going to my technical high school assignment every week.
At this vocational school, English was a low priority, taking a back seat to the 8 vocational programs of study. There was often a fair amount of time to prepare lessons and talk which was a welcome respite from the harried chaos at my other assignments where teachers often approached me 5 minutes before class and asked “-What do you want to do?”
One of M-sensei’s favorite questions was “How are the students at M.H.S.? Are they better than the students here?”
I was usually at a loss to answer, both because I was sensitive to the negative image held of the school where I was based and the fact I disliked picking favorites among my students. And, it seemed to me, that comparing the ‘low academic level’ students at my base school and the technical high school I visited one day a week was like comparing oranges and oranges. The students seem to share the same pervasive lack of interest in academics, English and plans to go on to college. -What’s the difference?
But, if pressed, I would lean toward the technical high school. Because at least the technical high school students had a “purpose”; -they were there to learn a trade. And the classes I taught every week with the same teacher seemed moderately attentive when compared to the loud or quiet chaos at my base school where students wandered in late, talked, slept in class and payed creative attention to all the minute violations of the dress code they could get away with
Needless to say my answer surprised M-sensei, “I think M.H.S. students are better,” He would say. I chalked this up to a case of “the grass is always greener” and let it be.
Time passed and another school year drew to a close. There are 2 certainties in life for Japanese high school teachers: death (probably from overwork) and transfers. At the end of the school year that March, many teachers were moved from one school to another. As M-sensei had spent 5 years at the technical high school, it was time for him to go… -to M.H.S, where they stuck him on the discipline committee. This was the equivalent of being exiled to purgatory,especially for a newly arrived teacher, and I did not envy him one bit.
In a low-level school like M.H.S., actual teaching sometimes takes a back seat to classroom management and discipline. Any minor emergency becomes the teachers’ responsibility. As a result, about half my classes with M-sensei were canceled. He gave the situation a good “ganbaremasu!” and I never heard any complaints. I could admire his dedication to his work, but it put a strain on our working relationship.
During one class we had together, we spent a rare moment of downtime while the students were working, talking to each other. M-sensei was somewhat apologetically telling me about the latest responsibility imposed on him via membership in the discipline committee, as an excuse for his not having much time to come to me beforehand and discuss what we would be doing that day.
I’ll readily admit that as an American (even one with an advanced degree in costume and textiles) I don’t always understand the Japanese obsession with uniforms. Why they wear them (to engender a sense of group identity) and all the creative things students did to subvert the dress code.
An issue of particular concern to Japanese school authorities is skirt length. According to regulation, female students’ skirts should come to a matronly top-of-the-knee-cap. At M.H.S. the girls were particularly sensitive to the messages of pop-culture fashion and particularly insensitive to admonishments from authority figures at school that what they were doing was disrespectful to the school uniform code. During the previous trimester there had been a crackdown on the practice of skirt rolling. The net result was that increasing numbers of students had taken their skirts and had them hemmed to a shorter length than deemed appropriate.
For a moment I was left wondering why they had chosen him and not one of the female staff members to confront the students, unless embarrassing the girls into submission was the point.
“So, you’re the skirt police?” I said. Perhaps thankfully he missed my insinuation that he was some sort of ‘chikan’ for checking the length of high school girls’ skirts.
He smiled as if to say “Well, someone’s got to do it,”
Shortly thereafter, I was teaching at my third highschool a “high-level” academic highschool which was about as far away from my other schools in terms of student motivation, discipline and ambition as one could find in Okinawa. Over 90 percent of its students go on to college. At M.H.S. that ratio was reversed.
In a moment of casual conversation between classes, members of the English staff were asking me familiar sounding questions, “What are the students like at M.H.S.?”
I honestly don’t remember my specific response. I did my usual dodge and evade when asked (as I saw it) to pick favorites among my schools, but I did try to mention some of the difficulties involved in teaching at a technical high school of mostly boys, who cared little about academic subjects and less about English.
One of the senior teachers at that school responded, “Every teacher should have that experience,”
From her perspective, at a school where she worried about her students college applications more than if they were smoking, drinking or dropping out, it would have been very easy for her to blame the students or teachers at either of my other schools for being lazy and inattentive to their work or their studies. And I know some teachers who might have said that, but she didn’t.
Every teacher should have that experience…
Every teacher should be the skirt police…
Himeyuri
September 9, 2015
Having lived in Japan for four years it is difficult for me to single out one day as my “best day” in Japan. My day to day life was lived in Okinawa. Okinawa, though legally and politically part of Japan, is in many ways a different country where the people happen to speak Japanese. While in Japan I did take five trips to see “mainland Japan” and while talking about those trips might be interesting and certainly more lighthearted, I feel it does a disservice to ignore the people and places of the island which formed the core of my Japan experience.
I’d been on the island less than six months and aside from a few business trips into Naha and one foray up to Nago, I’d seen very little of the island. I met a friend on a pen pal site online, Rina, who worked in the local tourist industry as many people do. She spoke English as well as Japanese which helped smooth things over. She was from Itoman, the southernmost city of any size on the island. One weekend day she suggested a trip south. “We will go to Himeyuri monument,” she said.
I knew Okinawa had been the site of a horrific battle in WWII. We would also visit the Peace Prayer Park that day and the very excellent museum there. But the word himeyuri meant little to me beyond the obvious translation “princess lily”. After a drive of two hours, we arrived at a small park like place situated between the usual tourist shops filled with shisa and beni-imo tarts and Ryukyu glass oddly made in Vietnam. My friend explained to me that several hundred nursing students had died in the caves there during the battle and this was a memorial. Given the ferocity of the battle I would not have been surprised if the entire island was covered with memorials to the war, and it is.
My father is something of an amateur historian, and WWII is a favorite field of study. So, I’ve seen museums on the subject in the US, and later I would see the museum at the controversial shrine of Yasukuni in Tokyo. Each tells the same history with a slightly different perspective. What is different about Okinawan war memorials is that history is not told from the perspective of the victors, nor the conquered, but the victims. When you round the gaping hole of the cave entrance where so many once took shelter and enter the museum there is little discussion of the weaponry or strategy used by the opposing Japanese and American forces.
The “nursing students” were not volunteers, they were high school students the same age as the ones I was teaching, who were conscripted into serving in the Japanese army hospitals and then abandoned to the battlefield when the situation became hopeless. The museum cases are filled with pieces of their uniforms, school pictures, sewing kits and small mementos of happier times that they brought with them and were later found in the caves where most of them died.
As I said, the memorial is located in what has become a strip of tourist development along the major route around the southern tip of Okinawa. Less than 1 km down the road, I spotted a building decorated with an enormous flower hat, the type worn by Okinawan court dancers when the island was an independent kingdom.
I asked to stop and Rina obliged. It was a shop of Ryukyu-shikki, or Okinawan lacquer ware. Maybe you are familiar with the type from Kyoto. The Okinawan style is more garishly colored and covered in stylized native flowers, like the hibiscus. As we walked up and down the aisles of brightly colored bowls and bento boxes, my friend Rina explained to me. “Only old people buy this now; young people don’t like this style anymore,” I thought about the young Japanese people I knew in their tiny ikea-inspired minimalist apartments, and understood what she was saying, but I thought it was beautiful. Later, I became a very good patron of the Naha branch of the shop. I think the shopkeepers always remembered me because I was their only Japanese speaking foreign client. The stuff is expensive because it is labor intensive and handmade and I couldn’t always afford to buy much more than chopsticks or a hairpin, but I felt it was important of me to patronize the shop. I always wonder if I go back will it still be there with the shop ladies serving sanpin-cha and small bricks of the black cane sugar to their customers.
The last stop on our southern adventure was Seifa-Utaki, a sacred site both during the present and the Ryukyu Kingdom. Because of the battle there over 65 years ago, very little of Okinawan material culture survives. The castles and other “historic sites” tourists are led to are all very carefully restored reproductions. All that stands at Seifa-Utaki are rocks. The rituals performed there during the Ryukyu kingdom are largely forgotten, but Rina thought it was important to take me there.
With a large part of their material culture destroyed during the war, Okinawa of the present and the future is largely built on memory, the memory of those who survived, and won’t forget. One of the great experiences of travel is to discover how we define ourselves as people by what we chose to remember, and what we chose to forget.
Lyra McMullen
April 29, 2012
Memories of Himeyuri and Ryukyu-shikki
May 21, 2012
Having lived in Japan for four years it is difficult for me to single out one day as my “best day” in Japan. My day-to-day life was lived in Okinawa. Okinawa, though legally and politically part of Japan, is in many ways a different country where the people happen to speak Japanese. While in Japan I did take five trips to see “mainland Japan” and while talking about those trips might be interesting and certainly more lighthearted, I feel it does a disservice to ignore the people and places of the island which formed the core of my Japan experience.
I’d been on the island less than six months and aside from a few business trips into Naha and one foray up to Nago, I’d seen very little of the island. I met a friend on a pen pal site online, Rina, who worked in the local tourist industry as many people do. She spoke English as well as Japanese which helped smooth things over. She was from Kochinda, a town on the southern end of the island. One weekend day she suggested a trip south. “We will go to Himeyuri monument,” she said.
I knew Okinawa had been the site of a horrific battle in WWII. We would also visit the Peace Prayer Park that day and the very excellent museum there. But the word himeyuri meant little to me beyond the obvious translation “princess lily”. After a drive of two hours, we arrived at a small park like place situated between the usual tourist shops filled with shisa and beni-imo tarts and Ryukyu glass oddly made in Vietnam. My friend explained to me that several hundred nursing students had died in the caves there during the battle and this was a memorial. Given the ferocity of the battle I would not have been surprised if the entire island was covered with memorials to the war, and it is.
My father is something of an amateur historian, and WWII is a favorite field of study. So, I’ve seen museums on the subject in the US, and later I would see the museum at the controversial shrine of Yasukuni in Tokyo. Each tells the same history with a slightly different perspective. What is different about Okinawan war memorials is that history is not told from the perspective of the victors, nor the conquered, but the victims. When you round the gaping hole of the cave entrance where so many once took shelter and enter the museum, there is little discussion of the weaponry, or strategy used by the opposing Japanese and American forces.
The “nursing students” were not volunteers, they were high school students the same age as the ones I was teaching, who were conscripted into serving in the Japanese army hospitals and then abandoned to the battlefield when the situation became hopeless. The museum cases are filled with pieces of their uniforms, school pictures, sewing kits and small mementos of happier times that they brought with them and were later found in the caves where most of them died.
As I said, the memorial is located in what has become a strip of tourist development along the major route around the southern tip of Okinawa. Less than 1 km down the road, I spotted a building decorated with an enormous flower hat, the type worn by Okinawan court dancers when the island was an independent kingdom.
I asked to stop and Rina obliged. It was a shop of Ryukyu-shikki, or Okinawan lacquer ware. Maybe you are familiar with the type from Kyoto. The Okinawan style is more garishly colored and covered in stylized native flowers, like the hibiscus. As we walked up and down the aisles of brightly colored bowls and bento boxes, my friend Rina explained to me. “Only old people buy this now; young people don’t like this style anymore,” I thought about the young Japanese people I knew in their tiny ikea-inspired minimalist apartments, and understood what she was saying, but I thought it was beautiful. Later, I became a very good patron of the Naha branch of the shop. I think the shopkeepers always remembered me because I was their only Japanese speaking foreign client. The stuff is expensive because it is labor intensive and handmade and I couldn’t always afford to buy much more than chopsticks or a hairpin, but I felt it was important of me to patronize the shop. I always wonder if I go back will it still be there with the shop ladies serving sanpin-cha and small bricks of the black cane sugar to their customers.
The last stop on our southern adventure was Seifa-Utaki, a sacred site both during the present and the Ryukyu Kingdom. Because of the battle there over 65 years ago, very little of Okinawan material culture survives. The castles and other “historic sites” tourists are led to are all very carefully restored reproductions. All that stands at Seifa-Utaki are rocks. The rituals performed there during the Ryukyu kingdom are largely forgotten, but Rina thought it was important to take me there.
With a large part of their material culture destroyed during the war, Okinawa of the present and the future is largely built on memory, the memory of those who survived, and won’t forget. One of the great experiences of travel is to discover how we define ourselves as people by what we chose to remember, and what we chose to forget.
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