Clean

The chances are that unless you have experienced it first hand, there are quite a few things that would surprise you about Japanese schools. There is still plenty that continues to dumbfound me, lots of thing I do not understand or simply do not know, and I’ve been teaching at them for about six months now. For example, I do not understand why there are about a dozen boxes for recycling paper and what the differences between them are; I do not know what those squishy things in the soup at lunch time are, although I suspect that is for the best; I do not know why it is necessary to play the same nursery rhyme over the PA system everyday to let the high school students know it is break time. Most of this I do not know due to my lack of Japanese and general ignorance, and is perhaps specific to my school only.

What others might find interesting are the more general differences between a Japanese school and schools elsewhere. For example, schools here do not have dining halls or canteens. Lunch is served and consumed in the classroom, with the students sitting at their desks. In fact, students spend a great deal of time in that same classroom, as they do not move from one room to another between lessons (unless it is for something like science or art), it is the teachers who move and come to them.

One of the most striking contrasts is the fact that Japanese schools do not have cleaners. They do not need them. The students and the teachers clean their own schools.

I am not merely talking about the casual sweeping of the floor and the standing of chairs on desks that we would partake in at the end of the day at primary school back home, I am talking about the full scale scrubbing, purging and sterilising of every corner of the building. Grass is mowed, carpets are vacuumed, toilets are scoured, cupboards are dusted. The heavy duty cleaning fluids emerge, the gardening equipment is heaved out. Every student has a job, and has to sign off their work with a supervising teacher at the end of the allotted 15 minutes each day.

Oh, and the whole thing is done to the accompaniment of classical music.

I had been warned to expect all this before I came, but still didn’t take it entirely seriously. Sure, there might be a cursory tidying of the classrooms at the end of the day, perhaps the occasional sweeping of the corridors, maybe once in a while a student or two might even by roped in to sweep up some leaves outside; but surely the real cleaning must be going on at some other time, undertaken by somebody else.

The first day after the students had returned to school following the summer holidays in my first few weeks in the job soon disabused me of that notion, and removed any doubt in my mind as to the level of seriousness in which the task was approached. As the school hadn’t had a proper going-over for a good few weeks during the break, this was to be a bumper cleaning session. I was sat at my desk working, not paying much attention to the activity outside the staff room, confident in my assumption that it was the normal hustle and bustle of a hectic first day back. I eventually glanced up from my painstakingly crafted self-introduction poster (that I would later that day spill coffee all over and have to bin), and in the corridor outside saw a group of monkey-like first years clambering over the banks of six-foot high shoe racks, furiously dusting away.

I wandered outside to admire their work, then strolled on to chat with those polishing the bookshelves in the library, questioned the sanity of those huddled over outside in the humidity picking out tiny rocks from the glorified sand pit serving as a sports field, and lent a hand with the emptying of the waste paper baskets.

Come the next day, and the sounding of the bell for cleaning time, I approached the vice-principal, and in a mixture of Japanese, English, and gesturing (but largely the latter), enquired as to what my role in the process would be. No doubt keen to keep an eye on the gaijin and his as yet untested cleaning abilities, he led me outside, in plain view of the staffroom windows, where a group of first year girls were weeding the grass.

“OK?” he asked.

“OK,” I responded, with a thumbs-up, despite secretly harbouring misgivings about my new job locating me in the full glare of the evil, evil sun. Nevertheless, I greeted my fellow workers, exchanged a few pleasantries, and got to work.

I really haven’t looked back. Despite the heat at first, and now the cold, I enjoy my fifteen minutes outside, trying my best to chat with the students, coming across strange looking insects and frogs and finding out what they’re called in Japanese, being chased by spider-brandishing first years after having foolishly revealed my one crippling weakness, and absorbing the boisterous laughs and comments of the third years, who seem to find the notion of my doing any kind of manual labour, hilarious. They do have a point, I suppose.

There is also variety in my work. At first the job was all about weeding, and nothing more, which sounds less than riveting, yet proved to be a task I found strangely therapeutic. As the seasons changed so did my role. I have found myself attempting to remove roots with ineffective pieces of wood masquerading as some sort of tool, or sweeping up leaves but not collecting them, meaning that the whole process had to be started again the next day. Currently I am involved in an unfathomable exercise wherein I use a dangerous looking spiked apparatus to stab, smash and churn the ground. I can imagine it might have something to do with loosening the earth during these cold winter months, but it hardly seems worth it for the mess it leaves.

If there’s one complaint to be had with the whole cleaning affair, it’s the classical music. It quickly started to grate, consisting, as it does, of the same three pieces every single day, No doubt the CD player’s eject button has ceased to function and so we are stuck with “The Idiots’ Guide to Classical Music.” I’m no classical buff, but it seems such a waste of an opportunity to introduce the kids to some new and interesting pieces, and not merely instill in them some Pavlovian cleaning response to the Blue-bloody-Danube.

Despite that, the whole thing is very much something that would benefit school life back home. Of course, there is not a chance in hell that the students (or the teachers for that matter) there would take to it. The fact that every school in Japan follows the ritual without question or transgression speaks more to the Japanese state of mind and tendency towards homogeneity than it does the intrinsic appeal of the idea.

Someone once said that it was a pity that communism never made it here, as it would have been the one place in the world where it might have stood a chance of actually working. The professionalism and dedication I witness at cleaning time at my school every day certainly gives me reason to believe there might be an element of truth to that statement.