My school had the strange tradition of taking the students hiking in the mountains once each semester, for a total of three hikes per year. This may sound like a strange activity for my Western readers, but when I told my friends at other Japanese schools about it, even they had never heard of such a thing. Their students did the usual school events - culture day, sports day, class sports events, and sometimes collectively made seasonal food and treats - but they did not devote a day to hiking.
When I think back on it now, my school had a strong connection to the four mountain peaks that could be seen in the distance, all in a clump. They stood benevolently a few miles away, watching quietly over my school and its sports fields. The school song began with a mention of a mountain peak in the same range, and the first-ever culture festival - held the year I taught - was named after one of the four peaks that stand together to form a park. The students were allowed to vote on a name for the festival, and roughly half of the options they came up with involved this mountain. I expected the mountains nearby to be something given lip service simply out of obligation, because it had been established in the past. It was not just a tradition in name, however - it was fully alive within the hearts of both the teachers and the students. In a way, those mountains had a place in the very soul of the school.
What the hiking excursion came to mean for me was not a sense of tradition, nor a feeling of being a part of the school's history and future. This seemed to be what it meant to the teachers and students, despite their only being in the school for a few years, and I don't think that it was my brief stay in the school that kept me from feeling like I was participating in school history on the hike. Perhaps I expected something different out of it - not a group experience that established that I, too, was a part of the school, but rather an opportunity to fit in as an individual. In this way, I succeeded. At first I felt alienated, as the hike took place shortly after I arrived and when the students and teachers were still too wary of me to make conversation; by the third hike, however, I was excited to participate and already looked forward to the small group of students that I had hiked with before. In a way, I'd become part of the group - a small group, one composed of a few students and teachers with whom I'm established a genuine rapport. And this rapport was not necessarily from school events, from seeing each other in the hallway, or from working together in class - I would attribute it entirely to mountain climbing, and in that way I was glad for my school's quirky tradition.
When I first heard about the hiking trip in the early fall, I was enthusiastic but perplexed. I wondered why the hike was important enough to cancel a day's worth of classes for the students when they had so much work to do already. Coming from my own experience, I assumed that the purpose of the hike was recreational, to give the students a day to breathe fresh air and engage in some refreshing exercise in the midst of their studying. It made sense to me: they work hard each day, so why not enforce a break for physical movement that will refresh the mind and enable them to come back to their studies with renewed mental energy?
With this in mind, I was excited as I joined the students and teachers lined up on the field outside school on the morning of the hike. I went with the tenth-graders, my students, and chose the homeroom whose teacher I was best acquainted with. She was only a little older than me, spoke wonderful English, and lived abroad in a Canadian town not more than an hour away from where I grew up. Most importantly, she had a sense of humor and a sense of adventure, she was relaxed and yet firm with the students, and was universally liked and respected. At least, I thought, I could have a comfortable conversation with her as we walked; this was not the case with many of the other teachers, with whom I didn't have so much in common and who often didn't want to be made to speak to the foreigner any more than necessary. Smiling, I joined Ms. S. and the forty students of Homeroom 7.
I hadn't taught them more than once, and they were surprised and a little apprehensive that I would be joining their group. As I stood next to their teacher, they gossiped loudly in small groups: "Hey, I wonder if she's going with us?" When I answered the affirmative, it shocked them into silence. It never failed to shock the students when I "overheard" their conversations about me, the ones held perhaps a foot away and in loud voices. Snickering, I joined them squatting on the ground and shielding their eyes from the sun.
In the field, we were soon called to attention by screaming gym teachers with square haircuts and squat figures. It was time for stretching, for warm-up exercises, and finally for more screaming - this time, instructions on what we were and were not allowed to do, to stay in line, to work hard and persevere and not put our towels along our sweaty necks. With that, we set out: in order, from Homeroom 1 through Homeroom 12, in single and double file, down the road to the park. Not only were we in order by homeroom number, but also by student number. Boys in one area, girls in another.
The students seemed quiet at first, giggling and talking to their friends, blinking in the unfiltered sun of the hot morning. Teachers stood at the street corners, shooing students across the road in the crosswalk, shouting at us to hurry up and run to get across the road. A few of the girl students shrieked in delight as we passed a day care center, waving ecstatically to the tiny children that pointed and screamed back at them. The day care teacher bowed, and we teachers bowed back, smiling apologetically.
We reached the park, already too warm, after nearly an hour of fast-paced walking. I had tried to engage the students around me in small talk, but it quickly subsided; a combination of their shyness, and our lack of common ground, silenced us. As we all came to a halt in the first appointed resting place at the park entrance, I stood uncomfortably next to the homeroom once more. They talked with each other, with their teacher, and with the other homerooms around us - but I was off-limits. I was still an unknown to them, too new, too unpredictable.
The mood of the climb had already become apparent to me, as well as the conflict: the gym teachers were focused on the students working hard and expending energy without talking or having fun, while the students and most of the homeroom teachers used the hike as an opportunity to enjoy themselves outside the classroom. The students expended their energy, but they did so by talking and laughing and racing each other, by goofing off and egging each other on. The homeroom teachers diligently tried to keep them in line, but they joked with the students and each other, smiled and breathed the air and squinted at the sun.
At the rest area, the gym teachers were busy screaming at the students again; I couldn't imagine why they were so negative when the students were both enjoying themselves and behaving. We waited for a few minutes while they shouted the list of crimes committed; laughter, joking, running. We were to stay in line and behave and focus on the hike. We had most of the way left to go.
From this point on, we were in the mountain proper; no longer were we entirely at the mercy of the beating, unshaded sun. We began our ascent first on the paved mountain road leading up, twisting from side to side, and then on a narrow, packed-down path through a tall cedar forest. We scrambled as much as we walked, the climbing part of the hike becoming obvious to me. Trails in Japan are not filled with nearly as many switchbacks as those in the U.S., and they tend to be steep and direct. We climbed up, we used our hands, we held on to trees.
In the shade of the forest, the students of Homeroom 7 tried their best to break out of the control of the line. Their collective personality was adventurous and fun and intense, and the breathless energy felt almost tangible around our heads. A group of boys near me had already invented a game for themselves: a quick rock-paper-scissors competition led to the loser carrying the knapsacks of all three, a position that was traded every few minutes. The girls near me giggled and rolled their eyes; I glanced over at them and whispered, "what the hell are they doing?" They laughed, not so much at my presence, but along with me, and at the fact that I'd just come out and said what they were all thinking. "They're crazy," they answered. "Crazy boys."
The boys decided, halfway up the mountain, that I had been walking next to them long enough. The more outgoing one in the group turned and accosted me.
"Sensei, saa." Um, teacher.
He wanted to know if I knew a comedian that he mentioned. I shook my head, confused.
"What's your favorite comedian? Musician? What music do you like? Who's your favorite actor? Do you know this Stevie Wonder song?"
With barely enough time for me to answer, they had already burst into song - Stevie Wonder, evidently - and their homeroom teacher had collapsed in laughter before she could muster the breath to join in the song.
"Sensei, do you like Dragonball?"
They burst into surprised laughter when I answered the affirmative.
"Who is your favorite?"
"PICOLO?!" One boy's eyes brightened. "Picolo is my favorite too."
And with that, they managed to distract themselves from further questioning by imitating Dragonball moves, and running to catch their friends for another game of rock-paper-scissors.
When we reached the top of the mountain, we broke for lunch. Wincing inside, I realized I'd committed another faux pas when we first encountered the amazing view - I had dashed over to the side of the mountain immediately, pulling out my camera for a picture. It was only when I turned from the view that I realized the students had all lined up in homerooms again, teachers standing at attention, and were being shouted at by the gym teachers. After the lecture ended, they began the most surprising thing of all: they sung the school song, or rather shouted it, into the distance. Victory, it seemed to say. Once again, we have climbed the mountain as a class, and now we're telling the world that we did.
The song wasn't loud enough, of course, and the gym teachers made them do it over after they'd berated them for it first.
Lunch was quiet. All of the students broke off into their own friend groups, and the teachers did likewise. I hung on the edge of the group that Ms. S had joined, the young women teachers not much older than myself who typically wouldn't give me the time of day. They were incredulous at my sandwich. "Peanuts butter?" Peanut butter is not normal in Japan. "How interesting."
I got up to stretch, feeling out of place and lonely. The students had become accustomed enough to my presence not to hound me every time I was in sight, but I was a teacher and therefore not someone they could socialize with at lunch. The teachers found me too strange, and not part of their normal lives of gossip and work-related complaining. As I crouched at the edge of the ridge to take in the view - an amazing sight with visibility for tens of miles in each direction - one of the English teachers came over to me.
This teacher was more than a little odd. He was around 40, a small guy with a dirty grin and an even dirtier sense of humor. Actually, Mr. M was the most "American" Japanese I met during my year there, and yet he could barely speak English and had never left the country. He didn't think of himself as particularly open-minded, cultured, or international. He was simply weird. Still, he was tolerant, he was blunt and spoke his mind, and he was tremendously easygoing. On this hike, it was no different. "So, what did you think of our mountain climbing?"
"Well," I began, "I enjoyed it a lot. It's very fun. But..." I trailed off, afraid of offending him by criticizing what may have simply been normal in Japan.
"But," he said, the word an entire thought in agreement with me. "But, we'd like to see the students simply having fun. Right? And yet it's very, um... militaristic."
"Yeah," I replied, surprised that he'd said it. "Why?"
"Well, they" - and he was clearly indicating the gym teacher crowd here - "they don't think this is a chance for the students to have fun. They think it's just a character building exercise and the students must get something edifying out of it. I suppose they think the students shouldn't waste all day just having fun, laughing, talking. They want to make them tough."
His emphasis on this word surprised me. It seemed that he'd finally found the phrase he was searching for, and once he hit on it, he stressed it as much as he could.
"It's to make the students more tough, to make them stronger. They have to try hard and they will get tougher for it."
I nodded slowly, seeing their point. Still, I didn't like it, and Mr. M didn't either.
"I think, maybe," he said in halting English now, "maybe the students should just... have fun. They don't need to get tough all the time. They work too hard now. Maybe it is good to have a time for them to relax. Right?"
"Right." I smiled to match his big grin. "I think so too. It's too bad that they can't have fun. They do work too hard already."
We stood there together in affable silence, looking out at the smiling, laughing students, all in matching gym class uniforms. They did work too hard. Even if they weren't learning anything half the time, they were putting more than a hundred percent into everything they did: clubs, cleaning the school, decorating their classrooms, underlining exactly the right words in their notes. They deserved a chance to lighten up a little in their hurried, stressful lives. And as I had that thought, I realized that there are ways in which my culture could differ from Japan that are a bit more fundamental and subtle than use of chopsticks.
On the way back down the mountain, the students were tired but giddy - or overtired and punchy, depending on how you saw it. The homeroom was slightly subdued but just as talkative, delving into weird conversation topics now that they'd exhausted their capacity for rock-paper-scissors and punching their friends. I hung back from the boys and the homeroom teacher, having had quite enough of their antics already.
The girls I walked with had been too shy to say much to me as we climbed in the morning. As we walked together, though, they'd warmed up a little, perhaps because of my jokes at the boys' expense earlier. Three of them got a little bolder and surrounded me in their little group.
"Hey, did you see that new movie yet?"
I shook my head. "No. Is it good?"
At that, they erupted into a show of emotion. "Ohhh, it was so sad! I cried. Didn't you cry, too?" They discussed it amongst themselves, shrieking and yelling, before suddenly turning back to me. "What movie do you like?"
As I tried to think up movies that they would know, they moved on to the next topic. "How about Brad Pitt?" (They shortened it, as all young Japanese girls do, to an abbreviation. He's that common.) "He's cute. Who else do you think is cute? How about Kim Taku?" (Another shortened name of a cute guy actor.)
After exhausting our lists of bands, TV dramas, and cute actors, we lapsed into a hush as they whispered hurriedly to themselves. Finally, the group's bravest member turned to me again.
"Have you ever...." They began in English, imitating a recent lesson I'd made them do. "Have you ever..." (giggle) ".... kissed???" They collapsed into shrieking and muffled laughter again.
I stared them right down, make a mock-serious face. "A boy?"
"Yes! Yes! Have you ever kissed... boyfriend?"
Solemnly, I nodded. "Yes."
"Oh! Yes!!" This answer pleased them tremendously, and they were beet red as they tried to contain their astonishment and laughter. "Really?!"
"How about you?" I asked back, grinning. "Have you kissed?"
They all jumped and screamed. "Oh, no. Have not kissed. Not us." I raised an eyebrow at them, which made them laugh even harder. They were all 15 or 16, certainly old enough to be kissing boyfriends. Yet, at the same time as I almost couldn't believe their denial, I could see the other side of it. They were 15 year olds that had the emotional maturity of kids half their age. They were girls in their mid-teens that still obsessed over Disney and blushed and screamed at the mention of boys. I hadn't quite figured them out yet.
On the next hike, I found those girls again. I walked with the same homeroom and I no longer held the crazy boys' attention, and they'd move on to performing their antics somewhere else. Feeling slightly out of place, as usual, I made a point of walking with the girls who had warmed up to me those months before. Despite the winter cold, the sun was shining brightly and we were lucky with an unseasonably warm day for our hike.
By this time in the year, my attitude had begun to change. I still taught rarely, but I had taught the students enough that they had a sense of me, a sense of the place where I fit in. They accepted it as suitable that I should come on the climb with them and that I was someone that they could look up to as well as joke with. I had lost most of my shyness, too. At first, I was just as nervous about talking to the students as they were about talking to me; I was terrified inside that I would say or do something stupid that would offend or confuse them, or even worse, have them refuse to return the conversation I tried to start. My nightmare was trying to break the ice with people who simply didn't want to talk to me, or to inadvertently do something inappropriate, or to be rejected. I was so unsure of myself; in a society where everyone had their place, I had no place, and furthermore when I tried to make myself a place I was often told not to. I tried to fit in with the teachers, but had no role there and was told there was nothing I could to do help. I didn't want to barge in for fear of doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.
After teaching, I had come to accept that I had a certain role with the students, though. I could barge in with them, I could be loud and start a random conversation and tease them. I needed to be bold, really, in order to hold their interest or draw them out of their shells. Going on the hike for the second time, I had started to feel like I had some sort of authority, that I was filling the teacher role in a way, that I had to tell the students to be safe and to cross the road now and to hurry up and to stay on the path. I had to jump into that role and hope my instincts bore me through.
With that in mind, I was less hesitant to start a conversation with the girls. They were quiet but friendly, welcoming of my presence and curious about me. What is more, unlike the others, they often wanted to try to practice their English with me. Somehow, that day, we managed to carry on a conversation for hours - half in English, half in Japanese, but always understood. There is a certain level of conversation that can happen between non-fluent speakers of two languages that is brought about by a sincere desire to understand each other and to be understood, and that is the kind of conversation I managed with the three girls.
The one ringleader simply wanted to tease me, for the most part; she always shouted "CUTE!" in the classroom when I came in and I terrorized her back by yelling it in her face the way she did to me. This cracked them all up. They soon tired of this, though, and the one shy girl and I somehow got on the topic of life outside of school.
"Where do you like to go?" she asked me, when I told her that I enjoyed shopping.
"Oh, this one area of the city." I mentioned the trendiest district downtown, a tight maze of streets that contained the craziest fashion and the coolest kids. I loved walking through there, even though I couldn't afford anything.
Her eyes lit up at the mention of the area. "Oh, me too! I love to walk there. I want to be a fashion designer, you know."
I tilted my head at her, curious. This girl was a little nerdy, a little shy, cute and hesitant and soft-spoken. It never occurred to me that she would aspire to something that is so trendy and bold. "Really? So, you're planning on going to school for that?" And here I used the word for university, which comes out of my mouth so easily when everything in the US that follows high school is called "college" no matter what one is doing or for how long.
"Oh, no, not university." She laughed and shook her head at my apparently nonsensical suggestion. "No, I'll go to a two-year specialty school."
I raised my eyebrows at this. Such a smart girl, one who could converse with me in English for half the day (and to this day I don't know where she learned it, because they had no conversation practice in my school) - this girl was aspiring to a two-year trade school? That was it? I was not entirely shocked, but unexpectedly disappointed. She deserved better than two-year school.
This conversation died soon afterward, as we were all so hot and tired; we instead tortured each other with images of the cold food and desserts we wanted to eat when we got home. "I want lemon ice." "Oh, what about cold tofu? With ginger? Ohhhh. I want to eat that now!"
I couldn't get my talk with the girls out of my head that evening as I relaxed at home. Their aspirations were all the same - two year schools to learn a trendy but dead-end career. It upset me to hear that they didn't want to aim any higher, and I also recalled that despite the boast that many women now go to college in Japan, they all go to two-year schools. They prepare for short careers as store clerks and secretaries and waitresses. And then they get married, quit their jobs, and have children. I wanted to shake that girl and say, "No! You can't be a fashion designer. You need to do something that will ensure your success in a career, because you are smart and you work hard and you have a good attitude, and you can do better than that. Just listen to your English! You could do so much more."
But I knew that it would fall on deaf, or rather just perplexed ears. To have what I would have called a "real" career, something long-term and upwardly mobile, simply wasn't what a lot of girls at my school realistically aspired to. Sure, they were only 15, but they spent their high school careers preparing to take entrance exams for universities. It seemed such a waste to direct those bright and fascinating minds to dead-end schools and dead-end careers, to have the skills they acquired be nothing more than ornaments to their housewife lives. I didn't want to tell them that I thought any worse of them for choosing that, because I certainly did not, but I would've given anything to have a girl in my class tell me she wanted to become a lawyer or a public servant or a teacher. No, they wanted to be fashion designers and daycare workers. They didn't want to be public school teachers - a good and very respected choice in Japan - but they wanted to be pre-school and nursery school teachers. They wanted the job that would not even pay half, in money or respect, what their male counterparts would get.
As I fumed over the girls not aiming high enough - and mostly because society told them not to - I reflected on something else as well. The mountain climbing trip, much to my surprise, had supplied the social grease necessary for me to establish a serious relationship with some of my students. The girl who told me her career hopes gave me that information in the midst of many other secrets, in the midst of a quiet list of her hopes and fears. She told me about her participation in the archery club and that she would have a meet the next day. Because of the meet, she would have to go back to school after the hike was over, on Friday night, and practice late into the evening.
"What?" I'd asked her. "That's terrible! You must be so tired, and we all just want to go home and eat ice cream."
"Yeah, I know," she responded, to my surprise. I'd expected her to tell me that it was her duty to go to the club, and that she's busy but she liked it. Instead, she sighed. "I really wish I wasn't so busy. You know, we don't get a rest here, ever. I never have a day off or a break. I just go, go, go, all day and every day. I'm kind of sick of it. Sometimes, I would just like to stop and not have to do all of this."
She had said it all so quietly that I knew it wasn't something that she would confess to just anyone.
Our once-per-semester mountain hike, then, turned out to be an opportunity for much more than simply fresh air and exercise and a chance to see the students outside of class. It taught me the simplest thing: not all individual Japanese will agree with points of their culture that I find strange or negative. Everyone may have toed the line publicly - scolding their charges for disobeying the gym teachers' exhortions to persevere and not have fun, or putting on a bright and energetic smile while going to yet another extracurricular obligation - but in private, I was finding, they could strongly disagree. They didn't go along with cultural norms simply because they didn't know anything else; they opposed them even while knowing no other alternative from personal experience. It was a fact I should have known instinctively, through my own common sense, before ever going to Japan - yet until this experience, it didn't actively occur to me me that my coworkers and students were not just "Japanese," they were human.
It never failed to annoy me when Japanese made sweeping generalizations about "all foreigners" or "all Americans" - that we're all rich, we're all white, we're all ignorant of Japan and its culture - and yet I never made the connection that I had these same assumptions about the Japanese themselves. It took a conversation outside of school, where I could be perceived as being on the same side as the teachers and students, for these quiet rebels to show themselves to me.
Even more than these cultural revelations, though, there was something that came out of mountain climbing that meant so much more. It was the bond that formed between myself and the students that I walked with; why it took hiking together to create that bond, I'll never know. But the girl students that shared their hopes and fears with me that day had an affinity for me afterward that I could never put my finger on, and yet it was substantial. They came to visit me in the teachers' room just to say hello, and at school events they would simply come up to me and stand there, either in silence or carrying on giggly conversations, as if I was an automatic part of their little group. Was I their friend in the way that they were friends with each other? Of course not. But my afternoons of listening and sharing and talking like equals, with mutual respect and desire to understand, created a strange kind of friendship that would last between myself and those girls until the day I left Japan.