Don't Mention The War

Typical. My favorite group of students have spent the post-April period morphing into a band of noisy spawn hell-demons, much to my regret and disappointment. And then, when it comes to the week where I tell them I’m leaving, they revert to being the friendly, warm, earnest young people that I fell for in the first place. This would all be much easier if they could just revert to the brat-mode of a few weeks ago.

I think there’s a tendency amongst ALTs to exaggerate their closeness to students and/or the esteem by which the students hold them. ALTs do like to boast about:

a)How cool the students think they are.

b) How beautiful the students think they are.

c) The level of trust and intimacy they have with their students.

d) How much their students fancy them.

It can be a bit unattractive and ties into the supposed “film-star” status that some ALTs feel on arriving in Japan. I could write a lengthy post about the self-esteem boost that male ALTs receive on arriving here to be treated like movie stars by elements of the local female population. It’s a bit more complex than this, but we can’t pretend it’s not both played up to and a boost to the ego for some.

Anyway, one aspect of returning to UK life will be the absence of otherness. We will once again be just one of the crowd. In Japan, we are really only defined by our otherness. We are not Japanese and that’s what makes us stand out. But in the UK, it’s our own dress style, personality, interests etc. that mark us out as individuals. I’ve joked on this blog about my increasingly dodgy dress sense in Japan. Part of this might be that I have a 30 year-old’s increased focus on practicality. But it’s also in part due to the fact that no-one from home will ever see me in my waterproof jacket and stupid hat. So one part of my readjustment on returning to the UK is that I will again make more effort in what I wear and how I present myself-and this is mainly due to external pressures rather than any idea of “looking good for myself”.

Since arriving in Japan, I’ve taken part in a monthly English-language discussion group attended by some English teachers in Okayama. For the past few months, they’ve been reading  the book of The King’s Speech and having little discussions about it. The book itself is alright-it’s utterly fawning towards both the king and Logue, but it’s interesting enough if you like that kind of thing. One problem with the book is that it covers the outbreak of World War 2. This means the War is a difficult subject to avoid and it has come up intermittently in our discussions. I’d love to have full and frank discussions about Japan’s wartime and immediately post-wartime history. It’s kind of fascinating. But that’s never going to be feasible in this country. Any time the subject comes up, it feels uncomfortable. People aren’t especially comfortable talking about their opinions here anyway, so it’s a subject you have to be careful around.

Also, if you want to know just what a lot of made up monarchist crap, the film of The King’s Speech was, just listen to a recording of the actual speech here. See, it was a rubbish speech. The guy took half an hour to string a sentence together. That’s who we had as our ceremonial leader at the time of our greatest ever national crisis. If the head of state had been elected we’d have chosen someone who could string a sentence together, with better health, a less foreign background and a sprinkling of charisma. Instead we were left with this guy who couldn’t even read a speech that was laid out in front of him. And it may sound as if I’m picking on people with speech impediments here, but it seems to me that if the main duty of your job is to make speeches, then we ought to have had someone who could fulfil that function competently. So this story is actually the tale of a dysfunctional political system and the coaching of someone who clearly wasn’t up to the job, like a low grade civil servant on ineffective performance management measures. Sigh.