My Favorite Child Was the One Who Proudly Professed His Love For Jaguars

A while ago, somebody in this office told me that I was going to be teaching kindergarten yesterday. I don't recall who it was but I was definitely told that on the 24th I would be going to the kindergarten. Well, the day before yesterday, I thought it would be a good idea to confirm this. "So, I'm going to the kindergarten tomorrow?" I asked out loud. "Oh, you are! Well, good luck!" "Um, no, you see I don't really know," I replied. So Kondoh-Kacho told me to wait for Okubo-San, who is officially in charge of my schedule.

So yesterday, I casually asked Okubo-San the same question. "Oh, you are?" she replied. "No, I'm asking if you know." "Well," she said, "you should ask Kondoh-Kacho." So I asked him again. "Don't you know where you're supposed to be going today?' he asked me. When I told him I didn't know, the entire office freaked out and promptly called all four schools to find out what I was supposed to be doing.

Well, as it turns out, I was just meeting with the Vice-Principal of the kindergarten yesterday but today, I had to give a self-introduction speech (自己紹介) in Japanese to all of the students at one of the elementary schools. Boy am I glad that I asked. I prepared a short speech and had the office ladies look over it for me to make sure there weren't any strange mistakes. One of the office ladies changed one of my sentences to read "the people of Aomori prefecture are attractive." I am not sure why.

So today at about 10:20, I showed up at the elementary school. They had me sit in the office while they prepared all the students for the assembly. A few kids snuck up to the windows of the office to sneak a peek at me. Before long, a group of shy little girls showed up at the door. After about a minute of coaxing from their teacher, one of them said "please come here". They led me to the gymnasium where the entire school was assembled, separated by class. They then had me give my self introduction, after which, they pulled out a map and asked me to teach the children about where I was from. I was totally unprepared for this, so I said something like "Chicago is in the middle of the United States. The weather is the same as here, it is very cold in the winter and there is a lot of snow. There are many tall buildings". After the kids sang the school song in unison (I didn't even know that elementary schools had songs), they opened up the floor for questions. The room was silent. Then the teacher said "He speaks Japanese, it's okay to ask in Japanese" and literally half of the hands in the room shot up. The questions ran the gamut from normal questions ("What's your favorite color/food/sport?") to normal Japanese kid questions ("What bugs do you dislike?" "What food to you hate the most?") to downright strange ones ("What is your favorite precious jewel?" "What is your favorite color for a ring?"). Naturally, I didn't understand some of the words they were using, so one of the teachers stood by with her electronic dictionary, ready to translate.

Back in the office, a few of the teachers tried to talk to me and one in particular was very amazed that I knew so much about Japanese novelists. "I haven't read any American books," she told me, "Oh! Other than The DaVinci Code". "Oh, did you read that?" a younger teacher chimed in. "Did you hear, they're making a movie?" LOL.

Then, one of the older teachers came up to me and asked if I knew any older books like Tales of Genji (for those of you who don't know, it's like the 1,000+ page prototypical classic of Japanese literature). He then started talking to me about Kawabata. "Have you seen the movie for The Dancing Girl of Izu?" he asked. "How about Snow Country?" I've actually seen the former but I lied and said that I hadn't. The Japanese have a habit of ruining their classic novels by turning them into terribly cheesy made-for-TV movies. "Well, I'll have to rent them for you sometime," he said.