School-wide Checkups

This morning, my supervisor, unusually cranky, asked me to go see the nurse in the school infirmary at 1:00. She told me it was for a checkup. This caught me a little off-guard--I haven't been to the doctor for anything sickness-related since middle school--even after she told me that everyone was doing it.

Sure enough, that afternoon I found myself at the end of a line of faculty trailing out of the infirmary. They were getting a pretty comprehensive checkup: height and weight measuremed, blood drawn, vision and hearing tested, and blood pressure checked. All I did was the hearing test (I passed! hooray!) but there were also questions about things like diet ("do you eat within thirty minutes of going to bed?" "do you eat breakfast?" etc.), activity ("how many minutes of exercise do you get per day?"), smoking ("do you smoke?"), and sleep ("how many hours of sleep do you get per night?"). I'd be interested to know what the other teachers said (and, more generally, what the responses look like for teachers nationwide), because I know for a fact that at least 80% of the male teachers at my school smoke, and every teacher I've talk ed to averages 5-6 hours of sleep per night and gets little to no exercise. When they do go out, they drink until at least 3 in the morning, and most of the time get right back up for work by 7 that same morning.

The more I pay attention to the lifestyle of my coworkers, the more surprised I am that nobody's died on the job yet.

After thinking about it, I figured out why they handle checkups this way: all non-emergency procedures take place during normal M-F 9-5 business hours. That's exactly when government workers (like teachers) are at work. Sending the teachers to the hospital on a workday would disrupt the flow of school, so they instead bring the hospital to the teachers.

I learned the downside to the whole operation, though: the teachers weren't supposed to eat anything or drink any diuretics until after the blood test. That meant no food, and should have meant nothing but water to drink. However, I'm discovering more and more that Japanese would sooner die than go without tea; all the teachers had drunk at least one cup that morning. The lack of food certainly explained my supervisor's sour mood, though.

Oh, and I still don't know my blood type, which provokes something between amazement and horror when I mention it to the folks here.