September 2002 to March 2003, Kawasaki, Japan

By Kelly Luce

The other kids called him Mochi — as in the mushy rice concoction popular in Japan. It sounds harmless enough, but what they meant was: Toshi’s fat.

And he was. In a country where skinny is a birthright, Toshi Takaguchi stood out. He sat in the front row of my third-period English class, the one I’d come to dread teaching. Few kids paid attention; they preferred napping or drawing to vocabulary Bingo. The Japanese teachers were no help — they’d just shrug their shoulders and say, it can’t be helped. As for the kids, they thought of English the same way I thought of calculus: what’s the point of learning something I’ll never use?

After almost a year in Japan, I realized that my dream of being the super-teacher with a class of eager Japanese students was simply naïve.

In class, Toshi usually slept. But sometimes I saw him watching me through the hair that splayed over his face as he cradled his head in his arms. It made me wonder: Could there be a grain of interest in these students?

Every day after lunch there was a short cleaning period. Students would grab brooms, cloth, and spray bottles, and do a reasonable job of tidying up the school. It was a fun, social time of the day, but it was also when I noticed Toshi’s bullying. It seemed a daily ritual.

“What did you eat for dinner, Mochi?” I heard someone yell once. Someone down the hall responded: “A pregnant pig and all her babies — with mayonnaise!” Toshi just pushed his mop from one end of the hall to the other, staring at the floor, always the floor.

I had taken to jogging every other day, something that garnered stares in rural Japan, but nonetheless it was a great stress reliever. It gave me time to think, and by the end of that year I needed it. It was coming time to renew my contract or return to home, and I couldn’t decide. While I enjoyed life in a totally different culture, I found myself missing people that understood me, missing being valued for anything other than my ability to speak English.

After a year, I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment as I’d hoped; I didn’t feel finished. I hadn’t managed to teach much English, and though I’d been to the festivals and temples, I’d always felt more like the token foreigner than part of the community.

I was also disappointed in the school system. One afternoon after school I saw Toshi surrounded by a group of chanting kids. I couldn’t understand their slang, but their tone and the ugly expressions they wore told me enough. For the first time, I lost my temper and yelled at the mob. My words were incomprehensible to them (lucky for me) though my meaning was clear enough. The kids ran off and Toshi walked the other way, avoiding my eyes.

That night I ran hard, trying to vent my anger. I watched the sun go down over a rice field and listened to the chorus of frogs, railing against the unfairness I’d witnessed.

Suddenly I heard footsteps beside me. Toshi!

Hello, he said. He wore his school gym uniform, navy blue T-shirt, and baggy sweats.

I followed my usual route, trying to pretend his presence was normal. Inside, I was panicking. Was he asking for help? How could I help him? After half a mile, when I could hear his labored breath behind me, I slowed to a walk. We didn’t speak while we caught our breath; I felt awkward, embarrassed, as a supposed authority figure, to try my poor Japanese.

When he was breathing more easily, I started jogging again. He followed silently, his shirt clinging to him front and back, not bothering to wipe the sweat that dripped over his eyebrows onto his face. When we were done, he bowed slightly and said, “Thank you.” Then he turned and walked away.

He joined me almost every night, sweating and puffing without complaint. He followed me wherever I went.

I wish I could say that a few weeks was all Toshi needed to become slim and cool, to stop the teasing. It wasn’t. But something about getting through to him, making some tangible difference in a world so foreign to me, did make a difference — to me. I decided to renew my contract and stay another year.

Over the course of that year, I saw a change in Toshi. He ran with me often and even participated in the school’s Sports Day. He won a fourth-place ribbon for the two-mile run. We began chatting on our runs, in English and Japanese. I was invited to dinner at his family’s house a few times; his mother wrote a note on gilded stationery that said in the most formal Japanese, “We are indebted to you for changing the life of our eldest son.”

The kids at school all knew about my befriending Toshi, and rather than turn them against me, it seemed to signal that I was human and capable of friendship. Word got out about my jogs and suddenly everyone wanted to join in. I started calling it “English Run” (the group is pictured above; Toshi is not present). Anyone who wanted to could join, as long as they conversed in English.

Outside the classroom the kids were relaxed, less afraid of making mistakes. When English became about connection rather than memorization, they were unstoppable. My second year in Japan flew by and I returned to the US with no questions as to my future.

There’s a Buddhist proverb I learned that year: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Years later, and still a teacher, I know that the reverse is just as true.

Kelly Luce worked in Kawasaki and Tokushima, Japan from 2002-2004; currently, she lives in the mountains of Northern California, where she divides her time between writing and trying to start fires in her woodstove. Her fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Storyteller, and Japanzine.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, December 15th, 2006 | Email This Post

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