Wrapping up Hiroshima

After the museum, I walked the grounds outside the museum, basking in the gorgeous weather. There are several exhibits around the park: a mound containing the ashen remains of 70,000 unidentified victims, the Peace Bell, and the Children's Peace Monument.


I took all this in, then headed toward the A-Bomb Dome (the rechristened Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall that survived the bombing). As I circled the building, I noticed among the horde of tourists a woman walking a dog. The dog turned out to be a Yorkie, a breed I don't often see in Japan.

I noticed a few high school students walking around holding clipboards, and soon one walked up to me. She explained that her class was asking for signatures for a petition supporting the peace memorial. She did all of this in beautiful English. I sort of stammered for a moment, unsure whether to reflexively answer in Japanese or switch over to English. After I complimented her on her English and signed the petition, she asked where I'm from. When I told her I live in Tsushima, a few other students came up and started talking to me--entirely in English. Is this normal for students in big cities?

I spent the rest of the afternoon just strolling around Hiroshima, enjoying the sights and the weather. For lunch, I stopped at an okonomiyaki restaurant. Hiroshima is well-known for its style of okonomiyaki, layering rather than mixing the ingredients. I was seated at a bar in front of the grill, so I got to watch the chef in action.

The menu included westernized ingredients and toppings, like cheese and bacon, in addition to the more standard octopus, shrimp, cabbage, and mayonnaise. I went with the standard type, but added some cheese. It was heavenly.

For dinner that night, Google showed me where a Mexican restaurant was, and I gorged myself on nachos and tortillas while reading On the Road and The Selfish Gene.

Afterwards, I found an arcade. Despite my love of videogames, I don't play most of the kinds I find in Japanese arcades. Not even Mario Kart Arcade sucks me in the way it ought to. About the only games that grab me are the Taiko drum game and coin-operated ports of games like Super Mario World or the original Super Mario Bros.

This time, however, I discovered a different game. A group of middle school boys were clustered around a setup that looked like an emulation of Mario. When I got closer, though, I saw the sign above the casing and read The House of the Dead, a zombie-shooter series that's been around for twelve years. I was confused, though, because the boys weren't holding up ray guns to shoot the zombies.

The game they were playing was called The Typing of the Dead. (The sign said Typing, but I had seen of the Dead and assumed it began with House.) Two QWERTY keyboards are in place of the original guns, and when confronted by an enemy in the game, you must type a string of characters (usually words or phrases, but sometimes single letters or numbers) within a few seconds to kill them. It's brilliant.

The game was intended to be educational--since it builds typing skills--and as an English typing game in Japan, it was even more so. After the boys beat the game, I sat down to have a go. All the normal enemies are killed by typing words, and tiny enemies (like bats or leeches) require single letters or numbers. The bosses, however, require you to answer trivia. The question is in Japanese, and three to four answer choices are given. You type your answer, and if you're right, the boss takes damage; if you're wrong, you take damage. This is all timed, in the interest of fast-paced gameplay, which meant all I could do was read the first two words of the question, pick an answer at random, and type it as fast as I could.

I didn't get very far.

On my way out of the arcade, I found a putting game. It looks pretty straightforward in a picture, but the putting surface would tilt and move around during your stroke. Craziness.

Monday, I took a taxi to Hiroshima Station. The driver complimented me on my Japanese, and during our conversation, I found out he's from Hokkaidō, the northernmost island of Japan. I tried to find out why on earth he moved to Hiroshima, but I couldn't quite understand the explanation.

I caught my train for Fukuoka and plane for Tsushima without incident. I came away from this thoroughly satisfied: I made a leisurely trip to one of my main to-dos in Japan, without using any of my vacation time.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial

Sunday was for the Peace Memorial. I took my time walking through the museum, having braced myself the previous two days. I'm not sure if I just didn't notice in Nagasaki, but Hiroshima's memorial seems to go into more detail about life in Japan during the war. Pictures, maps, and artifacts illustrate the lifestyle of the people on the home front. They're accompanied by captions that explain the consequences of mobilization on the home front: the sacrifices citizens had to make, and the employment of junior high school students in factories. I was surprised at how unforgiving they were toward the Japanese government; I haven't encounted much Japanese criticism of anything Japanese, especially with regards to history.

The rest of that part of the museum gave the details of the events leading up to the bombing--the Manhattan Project, the Einstein-Szil%C3%A1rd letter to Roosevelt, the cities nominated as targets, the choice of bombing instead of a land invasion--all amid photographs of famous people, ordinary citizens, and Hiroshima before the bombing.

The next section presented the effects of the bomb. It gave technical details--the time the Enola Gay flight group departed from Tinian, the time Little Boy was dropped, its yield, the time and temperature at detonation, and the predicted range and devastation. A model of the region shows the hypocenter and the blast's range.

Photographs highlight the complete devastation of the city around the hypocenter, with buildings, bridges, and trees flattened or vaporized. There are numerous artifacts recovered from the debris, including tools and other pieces of metal, strong enough to withstand the blast but severely deformed and barely recognizable. A scale model of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the nearest structure to the hypocenter to survive the blast, is also part of the exhibit.

Next, the effects of the bomb on the people is described. Photographs and explanations detail the suffering from initial radiation burns: severely burned bodies, both living and dead; a picture of a woman's bare shoulder, the pattern of her kimono seared onto her skin from the heat of the blast. They also thoroughly explained the residual effects of radiation poisoning: scarring, sterility, and cancer.

I can't recall whether the Hiroshima museum contained as much information as Nagasaki's on the subject of nuclear proliferation after the bombings. I do remember one of the last stops being a row of guestbooks, with information on various heads of state and other noteworthy people who have signed.

Just as with the Nagasaki memorial, none of this conveyed anger at the perpetrators. The emotion evoked the most strongly was intense sorrow. I felt just as awful walking through this memorial as I did in Nagasaki's, but this time I wasn't as afraid of accusing looks from the other visitors.

Like in Nagasaki, I came away from this museum feeling thoroughly wretched. I understand that I am not personally responsible for what happened. I also understand that the bombs were dropped not with evil intent, but with the aim of ending the war with the least loss of life possible. That the estimates which informed that decision may have been grossly inaccurate doesn't matter; the people with their fingers on the trigger were convinced that their solution was, if not good, then the least evil solution.

What makes me feel so awful is that it came to this. I'm ashamed that my country knowingly slew so many thousands of non-combatants and prisoners of war. I'm ashamed that the western civilization I culturally belong to developed such a technology and allowed it to be used to harm. I'm ashamed that the same civilization spread its way of life to this part of the world in the first place, bringing colonialism and exploiting for trade the countries who might otherwise have fought back against the Japanese.

The Japanese murdered millions of civilians as they conquered southeast Asia, committing countless atrocities along the way. However, the western powers are indirectly responsible for the scale of the devastation, having crippled China and colonized Indochina and Oceania while Japan industrialized.

Despite this train of thought, I didn't feel as bad this time as I did after Nagasaki's museum. I feel bad admitting it, but I may have been a bit desensitized to it. (Most of the stuff above is elaboration from after the trip.)

Miyajima

I woke up bright and early Saturday and booked the room for another night. My goal for the day was Miyajima, the island with the huge vermillion gate in the water. After the hour-long train, I took a twenty-minute ferry for the island. The gate was just barely visible from the ferry. While packed with tourists, it wasn't as crowded as I'd feared.

Miyajima is the name of the town on the island; the island itself is called Itsukushima. The island is the site of a Shinto shrine that dates from the 12th century. Probably the most famous part of the shrine is its large torii, the gate marking the transition from the profane outside world to the sacred shrine.

One of the first things I noticed was the deer: lots and lots of deer, just wandering around the island. They behave as though they're practically oblivious to us, not bothering to move as people walk near them. Several people stop to pet and feed them, despite the warnings of a sign...

I made my way toward the gate, admiring the deer and getting a weird thrill from hearing non-Japanese languages spoken. (I counted French, Mandarin, English, and what sounded like German.) I realized I'd arrived at low tide: the gate was on dry land, with tourists mingling around its base. There were several locals elbow-deep in the muck, sifting for shellfish. I spotted a group of Americans with what I found to be a nifty idea: they were holding up a dry-erase board for the picture, with a little blurb about who they were, the location, and the date.

I walked around the rest of the temple complex, all of which is elevated five or six feet. It was like walking on a pier. I wanted to come back for high tide, but the day's high tides were right around 8am and 8pm, which was too early and too late for the ferry schedule.

Overlooking the shrine is the Goju-no-to Pagoda. It's painted the same shade of vermilion as the shrine and torii. Apart from the gate, my favorite part of Miyajima was a swingset I found on my walk. Anyone who knows me knows that I eagerly availed myself for about twenty minutes.

On the ferry back, I looked over the side and saw the water was full of jellyfish. That's what kills the beach season in Tsushima. Once back in Hiroshima, I made my way back to the hotel and relaxed the rest of the day.

Hiroshima

The third Monday in September is Respect-for-the-Aged Day, and we got the day off the Friday before (in exchange for working the Sunday of Tsushima High's Sports Festival. That gave me a four-day weekend, and I seized it as a golden opportunity to do some travel in Japan. Previously, my only experience with non-subway trains had been the Taipei-Tainan express I took with Julie last year. I decided to fix that, and to go somewhere on the Shinkansen. The destination itself was a bit of an afterthought: Hiroshima.

I went to Hakata Station in Fukuoka, the western terminus of the continuous Shinkansen lines from Tokyo. I strolled up to the ticket line, tried in vain to find Hiroshima on the timetable, and decided just to wing it when I got to the counter. I did, and caught the next train out.

The ride was about two hours, and largely uneventful. I stepped out of the station into a downpour, and stubbornly decided to walk through it. The only cause for concern was the rain soaking through my backpack to my laptop and camera (which I bought at home in August), but the rain was strong enough (and my umbrella small enough) to make me give in and hail a taxi.

I had made no reservations whatsoever, deciding to completely wing the trip. I'd seen there was a Comfort Hotel near the Peace Memorial, and since that was one of the only two landmarks I knew of in Hiroshima, I went there. Luckily, they had vacancies. The weather was soggy for the rest of the day, so I spent most of the afternoon relaxing in the room, researching things to do the rest of the weekend in the city...

Lessons Resume

For my first lesson after visiting home, I shared my pictures with everybody. To give them an idea of where exactly I went--nobody knows where Missouri is, and the only reason they're familiar with Georgia is because Japan has a "Georgia" brand of coffee--I used Google Earth. This pretty much blew their minds. Once I noticed how mesmerized they were by it, I made sure to zoom from the global view all the way down to my parents' house in Springfield. The fact that we have a pool made everybody think we're rich.

I showed the students pictures of some of the food I ate, and they were as taken aback by the portion sizes as by the strange food. They all gawked at a couple of pictures I took inside a Wal-Mart, since most of the people on Tsushima could fit inside one store.

The most enjoyable part of the presentation was the road trip. The students were blown away by the size and speed limit of the interstate, mostly because the majority have never been off Tsushima, with its two-lane 40mph roads. They couldn't believe the size of everybody's house. Gail's property in particular fascinated them--especially when I showed them the artificial pond she has. All my students are convinced that everybody in America is rich.

I also showed them the pictures from St. Louis, and they were again amazed when I found the Arch on Google Earth, then switched to my photos of it. They've all learned about the Mississippi in geography class, so they seemed to enjoy seeing it.

When I was home, I made sure to take lots of pictures, even of things I normally wouldn't find noteworthy. I did that because I tried to look for things the students would find interesting. Judging by the looks on the students' faces as I gave the presentation, I did a pretty good job of it. My teachers still laugh at me for taking pictures all the time, though. They actually told me I'm acting like a stereotypical Japanese tourist, taking pictures all the time.

2008 Tsushima Tai Iku Tai Kai

Today my main high school had its field day. I was looking forward to this one much more than the last one I went to. We were given last Monday off in exchange for this.

We began with our normal morning meeting, and then everyone scattered to help set up the field. I helped pitch the tents under which chairs were placed for the visiting parents and other townsfolk. It had rained the day before, and everyone was concerned about today's forecast. I noticed that somebody had made a teru teru bōzu, which is something Japanese folks make to ward off the rain. It did the trick: we had beautiful weather, with an occasional pleasant breeze.

The activities began with the students parading onto the field. I use 'parade' in its military sense: each group of each year of students marched in ranks around the track, keeping time with the band's rhythm. The students assembled on the field, divided into three teams: red, blue, and yellow. Each team had an equal share of first, second, and third-year students, creating three balanced teams. The principal gave some opening remarks to the students, and everyone watched as the Japanese flag and the school flag were raised on flagpoles.

Before going any further, the students did their warm-ups. Japan has a warm-up song that's broadcast across the country every morning. It's called "rajio taiso," which means "radio calisthenics," and the practice has been implemented in schools and many businesses since World War II. Here's a video of students doing it. That's exactly how my school looked today.

I'm a little fuzzy on the order of the events, but there were lots. Everything was a competition, and each place was worth a number of points. When they finished an event, the students would receive a number, and would drop that off at a booth where scorekeepers were tallying everything.

There were several track events, such as the 50m, 100m, and 200m dashes; the relay race; and hurdles. Each of those was divided into boys' and girls' races. There were other athletic events, like tug of war. The most fun, though, were the silly races. The hurdles were part of a triathlon that ended with a sack race. There was a version of the three-legged race, except they call it the mukade (centipede): six people run single-file, with their legs tied together such that they have to synchronize which side moves when. (The teachers participated in that one, too.) Students also did the running-down-the-track-with-a-ball-in-a-basket-strapped-to-your-back-and-you-can't-drop-the-ball race.

In pairs and small groups, the boys performed some maneuvers demonstrating balance and strength. The corresponding activity for the girls was a coordinated dance. The boys also did some pretty intense battling: first, they did a full-scale version of a chicken fight.
One boy was held up by two to four others, and he would try to knock down other similarly held boys. For the next event, each team divided into an offense and a defense. The defense was given a ten-foot post to hold up, and arrayed themselves around it to best prevent its being toppled. The offense would charge the other team's post and attempt to knock it over.

For obvious reasons, the girls didn't participate in those events. Their corresponding activities included a coordinated dance, and a race where four girls would carry a ten-foot post, and run down a track such that they weaved around cones and generally got very dizzy.

We all broke for lunch, and I made sure to get a shot of all the shoes the students left outside the gym.

The second half of the day was a lot more laid-back. (It might have been planned that way in response to the temperature, which by that point was in the high 80s with lots of humidity.) None of the afternoon's events counted for points for the teams.

Each team had prepared an intricate dance. About ten people from the team were dressed in costumes. The rest of the team--about 100-150 students--was seated in bleachers across the field from the spectators' tents. Those students were clumped together and held different colored pieces of cloth. They held up different pieces at different times to create designs and spell words, also chanting things and cheering in general.

The last event of the day was a repeat of the dashes and relay races, but this time with students grouped by their club activities. To make it even more interesting, they were dressed in their club's uniform. This looked great on the more athletic clubs, like basketball, volleyball, track and field, and baseball. The martial arts, kendo and kyudo, looked a little more uncomfortable, since they cover the whole body.

Afterwards, the students formed ranks, and closing remarks were given by the head of the PTA. The final point tallies were announced, and the principal presented a certificate and trophy to the captains of each team. Everyone then sang the school song.

After every major school event, we have a faculty party. Tonight was no exception. In fact, it was exactly the same as last year: everyone got together at the Grand Hotel Tsushima, and had a party on a patio overlooking the sea. (One of the benefits to getting forty-plus teachers together is that we get to charter a bus.) Each table had its own grill with a tray of fish, meat, and veggies arrayed for self-service cooking. Everyone drew numbers to determine the seating arrangements, and I landed next to the principal. That was awesome, because he used to be an English teacher, and this is his first year as a principal. We talked for a little bit, before he had to go shmooze with the PTA bigwigs.

The dinner ended with various teachers guzzling pitchers of beer. We formed into a circle, and people called out a couple of the male teachers. Each one stood in the middle of the group, and, at the top of his lungs, yelled a cheer for good luck, while we all clapped along. We officially ended the party by singing the school song arm in arm.

The first after-party was at a local snack bar, and featured several teachers singing karaoke. The girls' P.E. coach sang the Mickey Mouse Club March, in honor of her conducting the girls in their dance to the song earlier. Eventually, they goaded me into singing something. I couldn't find an English song that struck my fancy, so I just sang Astro Boy.

Several teachers went on to the second after-party, even though by this point it was close to midnight, and we all had work the next day. I politely declined, and followed the rest of the deserters to the local convenience store for some late-night shopping.

All the pictures can be seen here.

Thoughts about Uniforms

Having gone to public schools with no uniforms, I enjoy drawing comparisons between the students here and the students I remember back home. The most commonly-cited justifications for school uniforms--that I've heard, anyway--are safety and self-esteem. The less fortunate kids, whose families can't afford brand new clothes each year, don't have anything to worry about here: everybody wears exactly the same clothes at school, all the time. Without any new apparel to show off, there also isn't anything for envious kids to steal or fight over. Furthermore, the case could easily be made that removing the distraction of fashion trends and classism lets the students avoid a big source of stress and anxiety.

Having seen it in action for a year and a half, though, I have my doubts. With respect to theft and fighting, I think what has been labeled as the cause is merely one of the effects, while the cause goes untreated. I doubt very strongly that any of my high schoolers would steal something that belongs to any of the other students. They're far from perfect little angels--there are bullies, jerks, and mean girls--but I just can't picture any of them stealing. There's a whole lot of trust in my community; when they go into a grocery store, students will routinely leave their school bags unattended on the ground outside the front door.

With respect to removing the harmful effects of classism and fashion, I agree that uniforms necessarily remove that problem from the school. Everybody has the same clothes, socks, shoes, and hairstyle, which takes away a lot of things that I remember being used as basis for judgment by everybody else. However, this treats a symptom and not the purported problem: people find ways to distinguish themselves from the group, and similarly find ways to classify and group others. My students can't compare brands of jeans or handbags, but they somehow have no trouble forming cliques just like we did. There are easily recognized groups, and those not in the group simply don't hang out with the group members.

My biggest problem with uniforms is the lack of opportunity for self-expression. This is not as big an issue back home, because no matter how stringent the uniform requirements, all public school students only have to worry about uniforms Monday through Friday, and then only until the mid-afternoon. The students here, however, average going to school six and a half days a week. On normal M-F class days, they average arriving between 7 and 8 in the morning, and go home somewhere between 5 and 7 in the evening. That whole time, of course, they are in their uniform. (Except during P.E., when they all change into the exact same gym uniform.)

I understand the case can be made that the students are being socialized with respect to fashion. It could, I suppose, be effectively argued that forcing the students to wear what most people would agree are mature, conservative, professional-looking outfits makes the students grow accustomed to adhering to a dress code in general, and to accepting such clothing types as normal. Indeed, I appreciate the value of accepting a dress code: every Japanese salaryman wears a suit to work every day for the rest of his life, and minimizing any resentment toward that fact will improve the harmony of the workplace. In addition, I believe uniforms have succeeded in shaping students' perception of normal fashion: in my experience, the majority of Japanese women wear skirts instead of jeans or shorts, no matter how cold it is outside.

However, the benefits of the dress code come at the expense of the students' opportunities for self-expression. Nobody is given the chance to try new things. Guys can't try growing their hair out, girls can't try braids, and nobody gets to try highlights or dyeing. Nobody gets to wear silly shirts, prim and proper polos and khakis, or Chucks to school. No cute socks, no rugged camouflage coats, no crazy eyeshadow. There aren't even summer vacations to cut loose and try a radical new hairstyle.

This wouldn't be a problem if the students invariably wore muted, mature-looking clothing when not in uniform. Were that the case, I would reluctantly accept the success and merit of molding the students' fashion sense. But when I see them out of uniform (most commonly on Sunday afternoons), the boys are wearing things like oversized sweat pants, faded jeans with holes, and t-shirts with broken English written on them. The girls go a lot further, with clothes ranging from denim mini-skirts to nicely fitted jeans to baggy sweatsuits, cute pastel t-shirts to scandalously low-cut tops, and six-inch heels to leather boots to Crocs.

Seeing this, I can only conclude that, far from removing any desire to try unusual and new fashion, the school uniform requirement merely represses that desire. It represses it so much, in fact, that on the rare occasions the students get to express themselves fully, they go wild with it. Their actual fashion choices are, to me, not nearly as important as the variety of those choices and how drastically different they are from their school uniforms.

I'm not suggesting they be allowed to wear microskirts and baggy sweatsuits to school. Nor am I claiming the dress codes I grew up with are perfect. It's just that there's a whole lot of room for compromise between the two extremes of 'strictly regimented school uniforms' and 'wear what you please.'

2nd Term Opening Ceremony

I made it back just in time for the official beginning of the second semester. When I say "official," I do mean official: the new term is marked with an introduction ceremony. All the students and faculty gathered in the gym, and the principal gave a speech. He also introduced the new Korean teacher, Kim-sensei, who had been hired on short notice after the last teacher couldn't take Tsushima and quit.

This was awesome news for the English department, because one of our English teachers also teaches Korean, and after the first Korean teacher quit, she had to drop her English classes to pick up the slack with the Korean students. That meant my normal OC classes, which consist of half of the normal 40 students per group, had to revert to full size. Forty sixteen-year-olds, regardless of academic standing, are pretty hard to get a handle on without turning the class into a lecture. Suffice it to say, I was especially happy to see Kim.

During this, I noticed one of the students was wearing her junior high school sailor uniform. I checked with one of the teachers afterwards, and sure enough, she was starting school a semester late.

After the ceremony, each grade level went to a different gym for uniform inspections. Nobody told me I could leave, and even though I knew I was allowed to bow out, I wanted to stick around. I stuck with the first-years, which is the grade I'm officially assigned to anyway.

The boys and girls split up and formed lines. Teachers inspected each person in line. The girls had to kneel with their bodies straight above their knees, in order to test the length of their skirt; if it didn't touch the floor, they were in trouble. They also had their fingernails checked; long or painted nails are against the dress code. Their hair can't come past their ears (unless it can be pushed behind their ears), can't come down past their neck, and can't cover their eyebrows. Anyone whose hair broke dress code had to cut it; this explains why, right before these inspections, I'll see students standing over sinks furiously clipping their hair.

The boys have to have their shirts buttoned all the way up and tucked fully into their pants. They also must wear a belt, though the style and color doesn't seem to matter. The length of their pants is checked, to combat what seems to be the universal trend of sagging.