One small death for man, one giant loss for mankind

My favourite author, Arthur C. Clarke died today. Doubtless many people across the world are reading their papers this morning and thinking, “Oh he was still alive?” He is one of those figures that has been so well known for such a long time that people just sort of assume they must be dead by now. However, today was the day. He was 90.

There is only one set of books that has ever made me cry, and that is Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series. Onions aside, it takes quite a lot to make me cry. However, after following protagonists to the depths of space and back, through generations and circumstances changing in even more incredible ways, yet still told through that human perspective, crying was the least I could do.

Mr Clarke had an incredible ability to imagine, powered by great curiosity and with an accompanying skill for explanation. His books often have appendices in the back where he will reference what his curiosity led him to read, what science journal article became the inspiration for some of his imagination’s fantastic seeming ideas. For example, he wrote a book in the late eighties, but set in 2020 or so, where one character achieves great fortune by solving the millennium bug. The actual bug part is just part of the character’s history and is not an important event in the story itself, but it shows just what foresight and attention Arthur C. Clarke had. However, his main claim to prophesising is satellites. He wrote a paper outlining satellites no less than 25 years before they were actually constructed and as a result no company could copyright them once they were up and running. Out of respect for his achievement the geostationary orbit that satellites orbit the Earth in is called the Clarke Belt.

So he died today but did you know that he left a goodbye message for his friends and fans, recorded back in December. The man who was born in 1917 had even the foresight to predict his own death and the dexterity of mind to be able to use anything the modern world could throw at him. He left his goodbye message on Youtube. I truly think when humans reach the edge of the universe the mind of Arthur C Clarke will be there waiting for them, wondering what took us so long.

If you will allow me to call Arthur C Clarke a hero of mine then permit me to say that I have two more. One of them is Douglas Adams whose fame and popularity is so widespread that to say that I like him sounds almost like a cliché. That fact does not stop me from saying that he is a hero of mine; it just removes the need to explain it.

The third hero is Rod Serling. This is him.

He was an American science fiction writer and is best known for being the man behind The Twilight Zone. Serling did not just come up with the concept for the show but also narrated the opening and conclusions to all of its episodes, and himself wrote 92 of the 156 episodes made between 1959 to 1964. He also has a great sense of humour and hosted television quiz shows, but the good kind. He is also remembered as being a humanitarian, for example he would often cast African American actors at a time when many studios refused to. For these reasons his home town even has a holiday to celebrate his memory.

The success of the Twilight Zone itself is so great that it has the only television theme tune that actually carries semantic meaning. People will hum the theme to express the idea of a strange situation or event. Even people with no knowledge of the show will do this because it has become so prominent in our culture. The phrase, The Twilight Zone, is used without a thought to the programme, just to express something weird happening. Even now nearly 50 years after it first aired they are still making new episodes of, though they are very different of course.

Aside from the fact that they are all men, and all now sadly dead, the similarity between these three people is rather obvious; they are all wrote Science Fiction. I have heard many an English teacher sigh when I told them that this was my favourite genre. There is a perception that such books are just about three legged men fighting two legged men with rayguns or robots. However, Science Fiction, and Fantasy too, have the flexibility to incorporate all the other genres. Science Fiction books can easily contain romance, horror, mystery and comedy but they do it in a different way. Science Fiction is not even really a genre at all; it is a disclaimer for, “This book can be about anything.”

An SF book can have you drifting through space as a baby, or feeling the raging fires of Io as they burn away into space. You can be sitting in the infinite comfort of God’s lap or riving in the agony of an infinitely chaotic universe. Without the walls that other genres put up there is an incredible stage by which we can teach, or learn, a lesson. If you want people to think then take them outside of what they know already. Did you know that the core of Jupiter might be a vast diamond far bigger than the Earth? Mr Clarke taught me that.

Umbrellas

The first time I went outside in the rain in Japan I was stunned at how Everyone has an umbrella. Personally, I never used an umbrella while I was in the UK (22 out of the 23 years of my life) for two reasons. The first is because it didn’t seem socially acceptable for young males to carry brollies. We are supposed to be hardy and not care about our appearance in that masculine kind of Don’t-be-at-all-feminine way, despite using water-soluble hair products. The second reason is because it rains everyday anyway so in the end you stop thinking of it as, “rain” and instead just as, “life” and there is no umbrella to protect you from that.

However, in Japan if you are a human being outside whilst it is raining then by law you should have an umbrella. It is not a written law but an obvious one nevertheless because not having an umbrella can actually be quite a hazard. Imagine the scene, a busy crossing intersection in downtown Tokyo, massive numbers of people build up on either side ready to cross the road. When they do cross both groups compete for the same bit of striped road and have to pass through each other as seamlessly as possible. On a rainy day these people are more like armies of umbrellas that hit and scrape against each other as they pass. Umbrellas don't just protect you from the rain, they actually protect you from everybody else's umbrellas which otherwise you have to duck and weave under.

The standard umbrella in Japan looks like this.

Available from about 50p, it has a white plastic handle but the actual cover is see-through. This design is ideal for letting you see the people you are about to collide with and the poles and walls you should avoid.

The problem with everyone having this standard umbrella is that frequently people will just pick yours up and take it when you leave it in the stands outside shops and restaurants on a rainy day. It seems to be acceptable in Japan to see life as an umbrella swap shop and I have done this myself with the massive array of umbrellas standing by the door of my guesthouse. I once took an umbrella only for someone else to take it from me later that day when I was in a café.

However, you can protect your umbrella in a very easy and animalistic way, you just have to mark your territory. Any permanent mark will do, it can be your name written on the cover of the umbrella or something more abstract. This is mine.

As you can see it is a happy fish. The choice of a happy fish has no meaning or relevance to me but its simple smiling face protects my umbrella indefinitely. I can safely leave it outside shops and cafes or with all the others in my guesthouse certain that it will be there waiting for me when I need it next. If I leave it on a train no one will take it, the guard will hand it in to the lost property office at the end of the day, and from there it will be sent to the main lost property centre in Tokyo. Since my umbrella will have a distinguishable mark they will not sell it on through private auction after two weeks with all the other white, see-through umbrellas. Instead they will keep it for up to six months and if I go to collect it and say I am looking for the umbrella with the happy fish on it they will say, “Ohhhh, so you’re the one!” Within seconds they will dig it out from the hundreds of thousands of other umbrellas and will tell me, “We’ve been wondering who owns this, we even had a sweepstake, are you by chance a retired cartographer?” or something.

So there you have it, a happy fish keeps me dry.

Year 6 Graduation

In Japan the school year goes from Apil to the end of March and in two weeks time the current Year 6 of my school will enter Junior High School. This is a big occasion for them as Junior High is quite different to Elementary School, the work is harder and they have to wear a uniform. Also, since many of these kids went to the kindergarten attached to our school they have been coming to the same place for eight years, a long time especially when you are twelve.

The importance of this event is recognised by the whole school and so on Wednesday of this week there was a big Year 6 Graduation event. I knew of this event because it was on my timetable and a few weeks ago something appeared in my tray. It was a song, all written in Japanese, which after asking the right people I found out was the song that all the teachers were going to sing for the graduation. The people I asked made it sound like it was entirely optional whether to sing or not and it seemed like many of the teachers were not going to. Then, there was a rehearsal for the song at 4:30 the exact time I am allowed to go home. I got a bit nervous when I saw that all the teachers had left the Teacher’s Room and had gone to rehearse in the music room. As I walked home I wondered whether I would be the only one not singing at the Graduation.

Nothing much happened until the day before the graduation where there was another rehearsal. Whenever there is a meeting in the Teacher’s Room I try to escape to somewhere else to do my work since it is so hard to stay awake during those meetings and there is no point my being there. However, I never know when the meetings will be and the worst thing is for me to be doing something at my desk and then suddenly a meeting starts up and I know I am trapped there for an hour. So now I have learnt to sense when there is going to be a meeting; there are a number of phenomena foreshadowing a meeting. For example, an unusually large amount of staff at their desks along with the principal, and also the moody guy looking especially moody. I detected such a stirring on the day before graduation and I asked the teacher next to me if there was going to be a meeting, she explained that there was going to be a rehearsal and that we should go to the gym together. So off we went.

In the gym the teachers were standing around until one of them started ordering us around with a microphone, moving us into the centre of the room were it seemed everyone had their own place to stand. My place was next to the principal and among the teaching assistants. We were standing right in the middle of the room facing the stage, all squeezing into an unexplainably narrow area. The teacher who had taken me to the gym walked to the front of the room and read a poem. Then another teacher walked forward and gave a speech towards the stage, where there was currently no one to hear it. The piano started up and I clutched my song lyrics nervously.

The singing began, I tried to sing the bits that I could understand but it was hard going. The chorus to the song was in English, it was, “Dreams come true together,” and during this line I looked up and realised that we were all being conducted. This was the first time I have ever been conducted and I don’t understand how it works and certainly had no concentration left to understand now. It was even more confusing because some of the teachers seemed to be singing the backing to the song, and I wasn’t sure which bit I should be singing. At the end of the song everyone left the gym and we made our way back to our desks in the teachers room. I felt my usual sense of annoyance at how nobody really explained anything to me. They had given me the lyrics but they know I cannot read kanji and no one had offered to translate it to the Japanese that I can read, which would not have taken long at all. Also they had put the only previous rehearsal time exactly when I go home and I wondered whether anyone would have told me to go to the gym if I had not asked about the meeting. That night I went home asked my friend Yoko (Hello) to translate it for me which she kindly and neatly did.

The next day at 10:30am I walked to the gym with a line of kids that was surprised to see me suddenly in their midst. I found a place to stand at the edge of the gym near the year 5 students who were playing music. As the rest of the kids came in I realised why we had all crammed ourselves into the middle of the room for the rehearsal the day before. It was because all the year groups were sitting around the edge of the room and leaving a big space in the middle. I looked around the room checking which years were there. All but year 6 were present.

When everyone else had arrived a girl with a microphone, the compere for the event, greeted us and gave out some instructions like, “please be quiet” and “let’s have a good time.” The staff and children shouted “hai” as in yes, helpfully and there was a real sense of co-operation. Meanwhile some of the year 5 students were arranging themselves in the middle of the room with long flexible colourful poles. They looked a bit like those Hawaiian flower necklaces stereotypically hung around the necks of anyone who visits Hawaii. The kids stood in pairs about four metres apart and arranged the poles into what turned out to be a tunnel. The music began to play again, everyone clapped and year 6 entered the room in pairs, walking under the flowery tunnel and sitting down on the stage.

Once they were all in the year 5 packed away their tunnel and resumed their places. The girl with the microphone introduced the principle who gave a short speech whilst standing on a box. The girl took over again, and introduced the fourth years. I was standing next to the fourth years and was a bit surprised when they all stood up and faced the front of the room like they were suddenly one organism. One of the fourth year teachers stood facing them with two drum sticks in her hand, she banged them together playing the metronome and someone hidden behind the year 6 started to play the piano. The fourth years began to sing a pleasant but rather boring song. After a minute or so, though, the drumstick metronome speeded up, the piano became more funky and the song became much more lively.

At the end of the song the room was unexpectedly filled with the voice of an annoying sounding American girl talking to a man. I can’t remember what she was talking about, some kind of complaint I think. I was totally confused but then it all explained itself when the beat started and I realised this was some Japanese techno sampling some random American girl probably from a film. The year four all swarmed into the middle of the room, found their assigned places and stood like a rigid army facing the front of the room. Then the dance began.

This dance was exactly right for the song, but it was the kind of dance that no one over 11 years old would feel comfortable doing. It involved spinning around, slapping their thighs and arses and that kind of pre-teen Dance Dance Revolution dancing. Yet together, as a 150 strong 10 year old dancing group they were incredible. I realised that different sets of kids were doing different movements at the same time in a brilliant choreographed fashion. Then they all ran around the room again reshuffling themselves like a giant swarm of birds changing direction. The song changed tempo and they all started drumming their thighs along to the beat making a massive noise that echoed around the gym. During the breakdown of the song they made weird floating movements like they were falling slowly through space then did quirk jerky movements to what looked like random poses. This went on for a bit longer getting more and more impressive and then they ran back to their places and sat down. One child stood and shouted at the year 6 a good luck and we’ll miss you message, then everyone clapped.

I was stunned. Firstly I was stunned because I realised that every year group was going to perform for the year 6. Each year had made a big effort to prepare their own goodbye, thank you and good luck for their departing schoolmates. What’s more the year 4 had just performed something perfectly suited to their age group, it was in between childlike and teenage, it was fun and embarrassing but together they pulled it off amazingly. Another thing that surprised me was that they had been allowed to do that show at all. The year 4 teachers must have taught it to them, or at least helped them to co-ordinate it and I have every respect for them, both for the time and effort required but also for needing to be so childlike and fun themselves as to want to teach something like that. In my dusty old overly religious primary school the teachers would have never ever got involved in such a thing. That is not to say they didn’t have a sense of humour but they were not anywhere near that fun and there was no emphasis on allowing kids to be kids. I have never seen children perform so professionally and yet with such big smiles on their faces, especially when it is not even for themselves or for their parents but for a group of people whose only similarity is that they go to the same school. But for them going to the same school actually means something.

Please understand my affection, my own story is that I loathed my primary school so much that I deliberately frowned as deeply as I could on the end of year 6 photo as an eternal reminder to myself of how I actually felt about it. I am honestly still thankful that those days are over.

Anyway.

The First Years performed next, a show called “Ojiisan no kasa” meaning Grandfather’s Umbrella. For this performance some of the kids had umbrellas and raincoatss while the others sang. About twenty kids did an umbrella dance before Ojiisan appeared and delivered his lines to the year 6. The rest of the kids sang the next bit of the story while Ojiisan walked around unhappily. Then they performed a dance to the song Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. Finally they sang Singing in The Rain and it was all very good. One particularly loud kid stood up to represent the First Years and delivered their message of appreciation and good luck. Incidentally the Year 6 and First Years ate school lunch together on Tuesday, I was there too and it was sort of surreal but sweet.

The Second Years had been making fish hats all week; I had seen them at the backs of the classrooms. Their story was about some fish happily swimming and singing until some sharks appeared and they all swam away into hiding. Next came some kind of plankton and then the fish all came out again happily. There was lots of running around, singing and a grand finale of long pieces of paper being pushed over the balcony running along the edge of the gym. When fully unveiled they made up an enormous picture of a big fish made up of little fishes. It was awesome, and quite a surprise to the year 5 sitting below the balcony.

The Third Years performed a strange and aboriginal seeming story. It involved about twenty kids in costume each delivering a line accompanied by some weird movement, while the rest of the kids sang the next bit of the story. I couldn’t understand the story but it was a strangely captivating story telling method I thought.

The Fifth Years had done something very different. As well as providing the music for the start and end of the show they had drawn a picture of everyone member of Year 6. These pictures had been put on large pieces of paper in the shape of hot air balloons around the room. One by one these balloons were unveiled and the names, and predicted occupations, of each of the kids pictured was read out. The Year 6 found this very amusing and were pointing and laughing throughout.

Finally, it was the teachers’ turn. Everyone gasped in amazement when the compere girl announced what was next. Just like the day before we all squeezed into our places, the poem was read, the speech given but today it all made sense. I had my special lyrics with me and we all began to sing. It was a really sweet song, there are some very good voices amongst my colleagues and I felt moved to be delivering this message along with them. I could see a few of the year 6 wiping their eyes and at the end of the song we all bowed and everyone clapped. I walked back to my place and some of the Fourth Years were enthusiastically giving me the thumbs up.

In that moment, when everything came together I no longer felt any resentment towards my colleagues. The fact that they had given me the lyrics and had included me in that song at all was a testament that really do consider me one of their colleagues, that I really am part of the school and had as much right to say goodbye to the year 6 as they. To be a new, foreign and strange teacher like the school has never had before and yet be included is a meaningful thing indeed. It is up to me to make it easier for myself, by asking for help when I need it and taking the time to understand the replies.

Finally, it was the Year 6’s turn to say goodbye. A member of each of the five classes stood and made a speech and then they sang a song. More pairs of eyes amongst them were being wiped and there was a real sense of sadness and goodbye in the room. This sense was so strong it made two first year girls start crying. One girl was crying really really loudly, so much that it hampered being able to hear the speeches. This then set off the girl sitting next to her, but she cried quietly. I have to say I didn’t have much sympathy for the loud girl, I wanted her to shut up as they sounded like attention seeking tears to me. The teacher of that class is rather young and unprofessional and seemed to find it more funny than a need to go and comfort the girl, or take her out of the room.

Eventually it was time to leave, the music started up and the year 6 made their way out again under the re-erected flower tunnel. Out of their own accord some of the other years waved them goodbye and some of the year 6 waved back. After them the other years made their way out and I noticed that the loudly sobbing girl was now smiling happily but the girl she had been sitting next to was still crying. I think shallow tears are cried loudly, but deep ones need make no sound at all.

I realise that my view of the school I work in is skewed. I am not present in any lessons by my own and don’t know what it is like to be disciplined by these fun seeming teachers. In the other school I teach in I met an America girl who hates her school, she says the lessons are boring and they just learn by rote. She wants to go back to America and does not speak Japanese particularly fluently so her opinion is skewed also. I have met a year 6 girl in my school who, when I asked her if she likes the school, said that she hates it. Adult eyes see things differently too. When the first year girl was crying her eyes out I saw her classmates trying to comfort her, I can imagine their responses being either sympathy or annoyance, certainly not amusement which was her teacher’s response. An adult standing outside the event can think it is funny or sweet that this girl is upset because she has no real reason to be, she doesn’t really know the year 6 and she is not leaving the school herself. For the kids wrapped up in the event it makes sense that she is crying, but not at that volume.

Working at the school gives me more faith in schools in general. It also reinforces to me just why I loathed my own primary school so much but it does make me re-think my definition that all schools are essentially day prisons. Yet I will never get over this opinion, there is always going to be the frowning kid on a dusty photo behind my bookcase to remind me of my own experience. All I can do is say bravo to Japanese elementary schools and understand that some kids will always hate school. Most importantly though I have to learn from my own experiences of school and be the kind of teacher that even frowning kids feel happy to smile at.