Tune in Tokio

sometimes ending up writing our files while leaning against the file cabinet that other teachers keep needing to use or sitting on someone’s lap. This sense of pandemonium coupled with the smell of burgers, fries, and chicken fingers wafting through the room sometimes makes me feel as if I’m not actually an English teacher at all, but a fry cook.

Needless to say, we teachers have been forced to become intimate with one another, much like actors and actresses filming a love scene. Except our love scenes are every forty-five minutes and generally involve not two people, but ten.

And to make our lives that much more exciting, there’s the persistent presence of Jill, our head teacher from Australia, a woman who, in spite of her fondness for brightly colored blazers and hair bleach, possesses all the warmth and approachability of a Salem, Massachusetts, prosecutor circa 1654.

Jill likes to lord it over us minions with a firm hand and a furrowed brow. And, sometimes, a hot pink pantsuit. Her most pronounced personality trait, besides a tendency to dribble ketchup and mayonnaise all over herself while eating BK Flame Broilers, is her staunch Australian patriotism, coupled with a similarly staunch dislike of Americans. She’s surely the proudest, most irrationally nationalistic person from Australia I’ve ever met. Of course, most Australians are proud of their country and generally get a massive kick out of being Australian, it’s just that their pronouncements about their homeland don’t sound like government-sponsored propaganda the way Jill’s do.

I’d recently overheard her chiding a student in one of her classes in her high-pitched Betty Boop squeal: “Why do you want to go to America? America is dangerous. Australia is much prettier, and the people are so much nicer.” Apparently she also works for the Australian Tourism Board.

In Jill’s mind, she’s not doing her job as an English teacher in Japan if she’s not riffing on the international nightmare that is the USA.

A few days ago I’d heard her say to a class of three stern-looking businessmen, “Americans are soooo lazy!” Which is fine, we are, fair enough, whatever. Sure, statistically we work longer days than anyone else in the world, but we also, statistically, probably ingest more kinds of fried potatoes while sitting on the couch for hours on end than any other country. But the fact that this statement is coming from a woman of about five feet eight inches and surely no less than 180 pounds somehow annoys me. She may hate Americans, but she sure as hell seems to love our Ben and Jerry’s New York Fudge Chunk Swirl.

During these chaotic breaks between classes, when we teachers are using one another’s backs as makeshift writing surfaces so we can recommend that Hiro work on his pronunciation and sentence production or that Masako give up studying English and perhaps take up a more suitable hobby like hang gliding or miming, Jill likes to barge into the teachers’ room and pick a playful fight with any available American in the room-like, for example, me-and ask inane questions like, “Why do you people refer to fringe as bangs? That’s so annoying.”

Though her outrage at America’s total lack of respect for such a mainstay of the English language as the word fringe is certainly understandable, I am at a loss as to how exactly we are meant to answer such a charge to her satisfaction. I have no idea how the word bangs came into being. Maybe it has something to do with Americans’ love of guns and the noises they make?

All I can think to say to this is, “Why do you say cunt instead of can’t?” but I don’t say it, because it would bring the conversation down to a level that no one is likely comfortable stooping to just yet. So I keep my comments to myself, look her in the eye, shrug my shoulders, and speak the only Japanese I have learned so far: “Wakarimasen.” (“I don’t know.”)

MOBA is the most popular language school in a country that has as many language schools as the U.S. has places to buy coffee milkshakes, and the students have many reasons for wanting to study English. Some are businessmen and women who do a lot of traveling abroad and need English so they can move up that ladder a little faster or chat people up in hotel bars more easily. Many are housewives with kids in school (or no kids at all) and money and time to kill. There are also a lot of high school and college-aged kids who want to travel, want to be able to speak to the foreigners they see, think “English is cool,” or simply want to know what Kanye West is going on and on and on about.

There are also a few people learning English because they’re movie buffs and want to be able to watch American movies without reading the subtitles. By far the best justification I’ve heard for studying English, though, was given by an extremely low-level fifty-something woman named Keiko, who says she is learning English because she wants to teach her son. This I regard as a triumph of convoluted logic. I don’t know how old her son is, but surely he’s at least a teenager by now. Why doesn’t she send him to the school? Really, at the rate she’s going, she’s going to be on her deathbed and her son is still going to be saying things like “This is a pen” and “I enjoy to surfing.”

I ask around about Japanese lessons, and everyone says I should talk to Joy, an excitable Latina from New York who seems to have an insatiable appetite for new hobbies.

“Well, I tried at this one school near Yokohama Station that’s got a really convenient schedule and everyone seems really nice and you can get private lessons,” she said.

“And how did it go?”

“Oh, I didn’t go with them because they were too expensive.”

“Oh.”

“But I heard the community center across the street has really cheap lessons.”

“Oh, cheap would be nice.”

“Yeah, but all the classes take place in the same room at the same time. It’s really loud and hard to hear the teachers.”

“Uh-huh. So…”

“So anyway,” she continues, “I’m thinking I just won’t take lessons right now because I kind of want to join a gym, and I’ve got my life drawing classes, and I want to study that flower arranging stuff. And learn how to kabuki.”

Thankfully, soon after this spirited but useless exchange, I meet Yoko Ojima, an intermediate-level student who takes private lessons. She’s about fifty years old and has wispy gold and purple streaks in her short hair. Her face is always immaculately made up, her lips a dramatic dark crimson, her eye shadow echoing the purple in her hair, her skin painted powder white. An active and busy woman, she runs a medical clinic that she co-owns with a male physician, whom she hates. Understandably, she is always at least five minutes late for her lessons, rushing in breathlessly with a few shopping bags, a leather bag overflowing with folders overflowing with papers, and a sheepish smile overflowing with many apologies.

Teaching Yoko is always a nice break from the shy, low-level pupils who make up the bulk of our student population at Kamiooka MOBA. Since she’s not a beginner, she can thankfully talk about her life beyond what her hobbies are, how many people there are in her family, what she ate for breakfast, and what her favorite movie is. And she doesn’t mess around. The first day I taught her I’d learned that she’d separated from her husband because he’d had an affair and later shacked up with his secretary. We discuss her marital situation at length during each lesson-how he stops by her business every week to drop off money, how his secretary just wants his money, how Yoko won’t divorce because if she does, she’ll have no legal right to his money due to Japan’s weird divorce laws that service the men and screw the women. I begin to feel more like a therapist, who, in addition to offering emotional support and acting as a beacon among the rocks, corrects his patients’ grammar and pronunciation.

I mention to her how clearly backwards these divorce laws are to an American.

“Oh my God, Yoko, if you divorced him in the U.S., you could take him for every sorry yen he has.”

She furrows her brow and tilts her head to indicate she doesn’t understand.

“I mean, in America, you would be able to get his money,” I try again, this time adding some hand motions. “He was screwing around on you, right?”

A nod, then another furrow and tilt.

“He was…uh…having sex with his secretary, right?”

“Yes,” she says with a roll of her eyes. She obviously feels the same way I do about this. Really, an affair with a secretary? That is about as imaginative as dipping your french fries in ketchup. I would have given the guy a few points if he’d strayed for the love of a trapeze artist or a bass player, but come on, a secretary is just a slap in the face.

“Well,” I continue, “all that you would need to do is get a private investigator to follow him around and take pictures of them necking in the park during lunch.”