“Come, old broomstick, you are needed”
This summer, the roster of schools I teach at changed. I now have a different junior high school as my base school and four new primary schools which I visit on rotation every Monday and Friday afternoons.
One of these primary schools, Tataki, has a grand total of five students and four permanent members of staff. However, this is no two-roomed shed, tucked away in the boonies. It’s a full sized school, with multiple classrooms, a playing field and a gym. If I were to hazard a guess I would say it could probably accommodate about a hundred students if it had to, perhaps more. The part of town it’s located in is relatively out of the way, but not excessively so. The residents of the area, it would seem, simply have better things to do than procreate. If my insight into Japanese society is as good as I think it is, then it’s pachinko.
As you might expect, Tataki is a very close-knit type of place, and everyone is extremely friendly. The teachers try, as best they can, to provide a typical Japanese school experience for the kids: there are assemblies in the morning, field trips and a sports day. Coming up is the school play, which this year is The Three Little Pigs, and I have been asked to play the part of the Big Bad Wolf. Lack of other viable actors and the presence of my beard are no doubt the key factors in my having won the role, but I am nevertheless incredibly excited.
Another Japanese school ritual that Tataki tries to maintain is cleaning time, even though there is absolutely no way that nine people can possibly keep a building that large clean by themselves when they only spend fifteen minutes a day on it. Even more so when three of those people are under the age of seven.
Last Friday I arrived at Tataki during cleaning time. This was immediately apparent by the classical music that was, as usual, playing over the PA system. The piece that was filling the empty halls that day was The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas, perhaps best known for its use in the sequence of the same name in Disney’s 1940 film, Fantasia. I changed into my indoor shoes and headed for the staffroom. On the way I ran into little Nagi, the youngest of the school’s students. He was wielding a mop that was bigger than him and having a not inconsiderable amount of trouble trying to use it effectively. The connection to Mickey Mouse and his army of uncontrollable brooms was evident.
I can only conclude that whoever choose the music for that day and assigned the cleaning tasks had a mischievous sense of humour. I very much approved.
