Teacher hellos

Barely five days after saying goodbye to the departing teachers, we had a school-wide welcome party for all the newcomers. It was held at the same, tired old place we had our schoolwide goodbye party this year and last year. Six of us left from the apartment building, deciding to walk on account of the pretty weather.

Maeda is a first-time teacher, having worked in the office of Higashisonogi, a school near Omura. Though this is her first year teaching, she's 28. We talked a good bit about Omura and Tsushima on the walk to Shimamoto.

Naomi is one of the new English teachers. As Satomi's successor, she'll also be teaching Korean. She's two months older than me, and this is her first year as a high school teacher. She taught for a couple of years at a junior high school in Iki, where she's from, but didn't like it. She decided to move to Canada, where she found a job waiting tables at a Korean restaurant. Nagasaki prefecture called her literally three weeks before the transfers were announced, asking her to come teach in Tsushima.

Having been in an English-speaking country so recently, she's almost more of a foreigner than I am. I have more teaching experience than she does, albeit a different kind and in a more limited role, and I'm more familiar than she is with high school in general, Tsushima High in particular, and Tsushima. Like anyone who waits tables for any length of time, she's quick to swear, often reflexively. We had fun talking, and wound up lagging behind the group: she wasn't used to walking this much.

At the party, the lot I drew had me sitting with Noguchi (the chorus conductor), Sunagawa, and Hamasuna. After the opening speech and the toast, we tucked into our food. I'd talked a little with Sunagawa, but I'd never had the chance to speak with Hamasuna. She's a grammar teacher who was called in on short notice last year because one of our teachers had to withdraw on account of cancer.

As we were talking about life in Tsushima, the topic of laundry came up. I mentioned how frustrating it is trying to line-dry clothes during the June rains. She, on the other hand, expressed how much she dislikes doing laundry entirely. She apparently had been living with her parents prior to coming to Tsushima, and presumably her mother washed her clothes.

As people began roaming around, filling each other's beers, Saito, a new teacher last year, approached me. We talked about our favorite alcohol--just about everyone is amazed that my favorite drink is a Black Russian--and he told me about his experience tending bar during college in Tokyo.

I caught up with Shigematsu, the coordinator of the multicultural program. She told me that she wanted to learn more English, and so we tried speaking only in English. This worked surprisingly well--she wasn't kidding about being interested in the language. We talked a lot about differences between American and Japanese schools. I expressed my admiration for Tsushima High's style, in that the teachers are practically surrogate parents, contrasting it with what I perceive as the much more limited role of American teachers. She agreed with me, but said she envies American teachers having relatively less demanding jobs.

Toward the end of our conversation, Kim joined in. We talked a little about school life, and she asked me to call her 누나 , which is the title for "big sister." Korean is apparently like Japanese in that elder males and females can be referred to by the general title of "(older) brother/sister." Men and women old enough to be your aunt, uncle, or parents can be referred to that way: aunt, uncle, mother, and father. (Sajikibara often refers to Nagato in the third person as "father.")

I also talked a little with Wakasugi. She was new to Tsushima last year, and is one of the two home ec teachers. (Yagi is the other.) We discussed Japanese cooking, and she laughed when I said I haven't tried making curry or omuraisu. She went on to tell me exactly how to make both, and I could understand why she laughed: the directions took maybe two minutes.