Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

This past Thursday was the first field trip of one of my kindergartens. It was an ill-conceived romp up an extremely steep and slippery, avalanche-waiting-to-happen mountain in the company of roughly 140 five-year olds in matching lime green and white P.E. outfits and age-identifying pink hats. Four-year olds have yellow ones, and three-year olds the blue. Surreal? Yes of course it's Japan. Refreshing mountain-air exercise? No no a thousand times no: steep; slippery; avalanche; roughly 140; five-year olds. I may not have understood everything they said, but I'm pretty sure it was something like, "Are we there yet? I'm tiiiiired. I'm thirrrrsty. Hee hee, look at the cute deadly millipede crawling up my leg. Ow, I almost fell off that jagged cliff again." But finally at the top, we were rewarded with the lovely lovely bento that we had just hauled up on our own backs.

The Japanese nutritional guidelines call for 30 different types of food to be eaten daily, and bento does its best to knock out about half of those at lunch. Bento is whatever you want it to be, as long as it's at least 10 different types of food each in tiny quantities, ideally half of which are squiggly mushy things with daikon, all served up in a multi-compartmented box. It's quite good. In kindergarten, though, bento calls for no-holds-barred maternal competition. A high school ex-student of mine once told me that bento offered Japanese moms a rare chance to show their creativity and love in a public forum, albeit a school lunchroom, and that moms sometimes went to extreme lengths and woke up at terrifically early hours to be able to provide their child with the most aesthetically-pleasing lunch possible. Department stores stock all manner of accessories to help moms turn ordinary sushi rolls into extraordinary tiny seaweed-outlined pandas, hot dogs into octopi, raw carrots into goldfish, onigiri into popular cartoon characters.

The kindergarteners devoured their whimsical lunches and I ate mine picked up earlier that morning from the convenience store, and we descended the mountain with our panda-less bento boxes, jagged-rock scrapes, cell phone photo-memories, and bags full of pinecones and rocks to show for our efforts. We returned to the pink and blue manga character-festooned school buses and sang adorable songs or stared blankly out the window, depending on our country of origin, and rode exhaustedly back to kindergarten.

The building my apartment is in is surrounded by rice fields. Across the rice fields is a temple. Behind the temple is a cemetery. Next to the cemetery, not 20 feet from the nearest headstone, is a playground. Monkeybars, swings, and a slide.

What's the last thing you would expect to see printed on the product stickers of two Bridgestone tires riding in the bed of the pickup in front of you on the highway? Is it perhaps, "Be Silky. Be Silky. Be Silky"? Because that was mine. But I'm in Japan, and I need to remember to keep my mind open to such possibilities.

Every town in Japan is famous for something. Gifu is famous for goryo ukai, cormorant fishing, and last night I went to the river to watch. My first introduction to the sport was in a book my grandmother gave me around age 7, The Story About Ping.

In goryo ukai, a team of two or more fishermen and about ten cormorants tethered by long ropes to a boat head out onto the river around dusk. Cormorants are largish dark sleek seabirds similar to loons, somewhere between a duck and a goose in size. One fisherman holds the leashes of the birds, while the other tends to the fire, a wire basket full of swinging burning logs which hangs from a long arched post at the front of the boat, and which provides the only illumination. The birds, still tethered, dive for fish following instinct, but are prevented from swallowing them by the tight rings worn around their necks. Whenever a cormorant makes a catch, the fisherman hauls him in, takes the fish from his bill, and throws him back in the water to catch more. This lasts for several hours.

Ukai fishing has been practiced in Japan for about 1,300 years, but like many such ancient arts, it is dying out. It is no longer a commercially viable fishing method, however it has found new life in the tourist industry. There were about 20 tourist boats besides ours last night, each one capable of holding 15-20 people, mostly elderly onsen guests. So while the few remaining ukai practitioners may not be able to make a living from the fish they catch, the $30 per tourist fee, more with optional dinner service, has enabled them to survive.

For more information on goryo ukai, and far better pictures than I was able to capture with my mobile phone, go here or here.

The post offices here often give me small presents when I mail letters home. I've gotten a small kite, an inflatable paper beach ball, a package of origami paper, and some sort of plastic whirling toy, all slipped in with my change. Today I received two packets of flower seeds. At the post office in Texas, not even the smiles were free.

I had to call roll today for a class of 32 four-year-olds. They giggled a lot at my pronunciation. Remember that one really nice, quiet Chinese teacher who used to substitute sometimes in third grade? And during the spelling quiz, every time she said "number three" and "number thirteen," everyone snickered because she pronounced it "number tree" and "number turteen"? Well today, that was me. And if that's karma, I'm already dreading the first field trip.

Words the kindergarteners have picked up so far from hanging out with me: "Wow!", "Yay!", "Alright!", and "You're welcome" (sort of). Words I've picked up from the kindergarteners: "Dekita? (Can you do it?)", "Dekita! (I did it!)", and "Oshiiko! (I'm a four-year-old who has to pee NOW!)". I think I'm definitely getting the better language lesson.

On Friday, the kindergarteners and I spent the afternoon coloring. As an adult, it's easy to forget what simple bliss coloring can be. I was also surprised at how much better I've gotten since the last time I colored approximately 20 years ago, even without any practice in the meantime at all. I recreated the desert island scene I was fond of drawing back in elementary school, blue water, lazy butterflies, a lone palm tree, bright flowers growing inexplicably out of the sand, a koala because it's always Australia, and a bright sun in its universally agreed-upon by children everywhere position of the upper left-hand corner of the page. I was very proud of my drawing, I colored more or less inside the lines, and everyone could tell what everything was without my having to tell them. And then I felt a surprising pang of loss when I realized I had no one to give it to who would proudly hang it on their refrigerator. I hung it on my own refrigerator, but that just felt silly, so I folded it up and tucked it into a book to deal with later. Maybe that's why adults don't color. What's the point, if there's no one to give it to for their refrigerator?

Three children so far have given me drawings they made of me. There's not much in the world as flattering. I've noticed a strange thing, though. Women I've seen so far in Japan are almost unvaryingly traditionally feminine. They have long hair, they speak in high, animated voices, they walk in tiny mincing steps, and they wear lots of pink. At the moment, my hair is short spikey black. Children are so thrown by this, in additon to my unfamiliar facial features and height, that at least twice a day for my first two weeks at the kindergartens, puzzled four-year olds would approach me to confirm that I am a female. They thought so, but they wanted to make sure. Usually this was done verbally, but on a few occasions, they just grabbed. The three drawings I was given all showed me in accurate clothing and body type, but with two long pigtails. Perhaps they couldn't conceive of a girl without them. Last year, when I had long blonde hair, great pains were taken to make the details true-to-life. It's interesting to see how they have slightly altered me since then to fit better with their young world view.

H A P P Y   M O T H E R ' S   D A Y ,   M O M ! ! !

After five and a half months of serious deliberation, I finally feel comfortable settling on a New Year's Resolution. From now on, I vow to try to put a stop to my endless search for the thing I am just naturally good at without having to study or practice. Just to personally underscore the need for this resolution, I'm compiling a list of things I once suspected/fantasized I might have some kind of untapped precocious gift for, even though I'm now far too old to be precocious, and my suspicions have unvaryingly turned out to be unfounded. Legendary careers I've so far given up on: tennis player, pianist, rock star, journalist, long-distance runner, violinist, muckraking investigative reporter, documentarian photographer, beloved university professor, Olympic archer (thanks, summer camp), rock stars' personal stylist, museum curator, basketball player, young undeclared entrepreneur, some sort of professional traveler who makes good money in an as-yet-undiscovered way, copy editor, theater set designer, playwright, Olympic swimmer, fashion designer, chemist, archaeologist, astronomer, novelist, the person who creates a chain of vegetarian fast-food restaurants whose popularity sweeps the nation, wacky offbeat interior decorator, travel writer, young bookstore owner, record label owner, music producer, DJ, magazine editor, oceanographer, and drummer. Sometimes I wonder whether modern folks would have more, or less anxiety if they were just expected to follow into their fathers' professions without having to go through the humbling experience of exploring natural (in)aptitudes. Like a 19th century blacksmith, or the current U.S. President, for example.