There are only three English teachers at Takasu; one of them is a semi-retired teacher working a 24-hour contract. She works four-day weeks and leaves school at 3 pm. The Japanese have a mandatory retirement age of 62. After 62, they retiree may only work reduced hours. Another teacher is in her second year of teaching and this is her first full time position. She is 23, younger than my daughter Jessica. The third teacher, Kagari is the driving force behind the English curriculum at Takasu. She dictates to the other teachers what they will teach and how they will teach it. She literally uses the other two teachers as proxies. This is actually good. The new teacher needs the help to get started and the semi-retired teacher is treating this more like retirement. They both benefit from the direction.
The faculty room is the same set up as the old school. There is a large office with all of the teachers’ desks grouped according to grade level. My desk is lumped in with the first grade students. Six of the seven first grade teachers are new to the school. My desk is situated next to the 23-year-old teacher. One teacher, Takumi, followed me from Kawaragi to Takasu, he teaches math. He is one of the new teachers in the first grade as well. The two science teachers, shop teacher and the Japanese teachers are all new as well. The leader of our first grade group is the art teacher. He is the only teacher at our level who was at Takasu last school year. He visited Pullman 18 years ago and he still has the business cards from some of the teachers back then.
Nagatome, the first grade Japanese teacher is 29 years old. She is very nice and makes an effort to communicate with me. She has asked about me being a vegetarian and what foods I eat. She knows that I don’t drink alcohol. She knows that I like drinking Coke Zero and coffee, but I can’t drink caffeine in the afternoon. I told her that since I turned 30 years old, I haven’t been able to drink caffeine past noon. She has shown me pictures from her trip to Italy and France, but she has sworn me to secrecy about her traveling companion. We have talked about all of these things. The thing is she doesn’t speak any English and I don’t speak any Japanese. All of our communication has been done with pictures and jabbering in our respective languages. Kagari laughs at how Nagatome speaks only Japanese to me. She doesn’t realize how much information she actually can get through just because she is patient and interested.
Other teachers are very quiet. Part of it has to do with the limited time that I will be at the school; another factor is how new they are to the school, but most of it has to do with the culture. There is ‘Uichi,’ in the group and then there is outside the group. It is very difficult for westerners to ever get ‘uichi.’ Over the past couple of weeks, I have gotten to know some of them a bit better, but I don’t have anyone like Katsumoto at Takasu. I don’t have anyone to bring me into the group.
Takasu is on a peninsula in the far Southeastern corner of the city. It is about 10 kilometers from our apartment through the winding streets.
Tall apartments buildings surround the school. No student has to walk more than half of a kilometer to get to school. I am sure that most of them can see the school from their apartments. 
Next to the school is an inlet where some sailboats are moored. During my breaks and between classes I will go up to the third floor, outside the English classroom and look at the boats allowing my mind to take a brief sail in the bay. The kids are ‘Genki.’ Boys chase each other in the halls and wrestle each other to the floor when they catch each other. Girls hike their knee length skirts up as far as they can to show as much thigh as they can, ‘but’ for the most part they are friendly. In a speech at an assembly one teacher said that the kids were good because they only broke 5 windows last year. The discipline is entirely different from school discipline in the states. After witnessing what goes on in schools here, I know that I would not send one of my kids to a Japanese school.
While standing in the halls, I have seen fights nearly break out. Teachers standing near me have seen the same thing, but have not acted to stop it. I have been told not to discipline the students. At home, none of the behavior would be allowed to continue. Not only are some students in danger of being injured, but also there is a real possibility of a student reacting violently to the harassment they endure. Fortunately, in Japan school violence is often at the point of a knife and not at the point of a gun.
The situation sounds horrible when I write about it, but it isn’t that bad. Kawaragi had many students behave similarly, but the areas there were more contained and so the students could not get too carried away. At Takasu, the students have long and broad halls where they run wild during breaks. At Takasu, I really enjoy working with the first grade students. They are fresh and eager to learn English. The way the Japanese instruct English is with an emphasis on grammar. They do not focus on communication, which seems to dampen students’ spirits, and many of them lose interest in studying it any further. I do have allies in each of the classes, students who remain interested in studying, but just like at Kawaragi, many students totally check out and talk or sleep through class.
Takasu is smaller and the population of students is a little different from my former school. The problems that Japanese education faces though, remain the same. Students study too much out side of school, talk too much inside of it.
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