Tim Anderson - Tune in Tokio

A few weeks in, I have a breakthrough. Extremely hungover from my previous night’s lesson with my business students, I can’t bear the thought of teasing English out of Kai for an hour and a half. I take the easy way out and ask her about her print-club pictures, the instant photos you can have taken at shopping plazas and game centers all over Japan and that are decorated with titles of your choosing, generally messages like “Happy Camping!” or “Laughing Party!” and always feature at least one cute animated creature waving at the camera from the corner of the photo for good measure. When I ask her if she likes taking print-club pictures, it is a watershed moment. Immediately she is seized with a new energy. Her face lights up, and she seems to float across the room to get her pocket organizer, where she keeps all the stickers. She returns to her desk and opens the organizer.

“This is me and Kumiko at game center in the Shibuya,” she beams. “And this is at mall near to my house. Oh, and this is mall in Shinjuku.” That’s just the beginning. We spend the rest of our time that day looking at and discussing photo stickers of her alone, her and her friends, her and her boyfriend-whoisn’t-really-her-boyfriend-really-but-they-kissed-once, and her friends alone and with their boyfriends-who-aren’t-really-their-boyfriends, all taken in malls and game centers throughout West Tokyo. She never asks to see my print-club pictures, even when I offer to show them to her (I only have two), but I don’t push it. I have just successfully moved our awkward teacher/student relationship to the next level, so I can hardly complain. Plus, I get to learn that Kumiko smokes cigarettes sometimes, plays the guitar, and has talked about going to a tanning salon.

One day, she asks me a peculiar question. “What’s a cinderblock?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because my friend Denise telled me this joke at the summer camp in U.S., and I never understand it.”

“What’s the joke?”

“OK, a girl named Rose ask her father how she got her name, and he say, ‘When you were born, rose petals fell onto your face while mommy was holding you.’ Then his other daughter Violet ask same question, and he say, ‘When you are born, violet petals fell onto your face while mommy was holding you.’ Then his third daughter asks same question, and he say, ‘Shut up, Cinderblock!’”

I explain to her what a cinderblock is, and she covers her mouth and laughs. Then she gets on the Internet and starts translating the joke into Japanese for all her friends.

Seizing on this moment of lighthearted fun, I say, “OK, and after you finish doing that, we can finish this worksheet!”

She pretends not to hear me, and I sit in silence as she click-click-clicks her fingers on the keyboard, telling the sad story of poor, lonely, unloved Cinderblock.

This job leads to another job with a little first grader named Ryuji. His mother works for IBM and knows Kai and Daisuke’s parents, which is how I get the job. Since I’m now on a mission to make children like me, I gladly accept another tutoring gig. Ryuji, his mother, and his grandmother have also just returned from a stint in the States, so Ryuji is continuing his study of English in the same fashion as Kai and Daisuke.

The first day of class, I show up at his house, ring the doorbell, and Ryuji answers the door with a puppy in one hand and a paper airplane in the other.

“Teacher?” he says.

“Yes,” I smile.

“ Bark ,” the puppy says.

Then he pivots around and launches the paper airplane down the hall, hitting his grandmother in the forehead.

I am very happy to find out that he is not nearly as averse to continuing his English as Kai and Daisuke. Though I am still not the international man of mystery to him like I am to the business folk, he doesn’t resent my very presence like Kai and Daisuke, and he usually even looks happy to see me when I arrive. In fact, I often have trouble shutting him up; he has an amazing ability to stray from any topic and involve me in complicated discussions that his English is not sophisticated enough to handle.

“Spiderman’s Batman,” he says once when we are talking about the difference between subjects and verbs.

“Huh?”

“Spiderman’s Batman.”

“Spiderman’s Batman?”

“Yeah.”

“Um, I know Spiderman and Batman.”

“Yeah.”

“What about them?”

“He have gun.”

“Spiderman?”

“No.”

“Batman?”

“Batman.”

“He has a gun?”

“But Spiderman have wings.”

“Wings?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean he can make a spider web.”

“And he go kssshhh! Powwww! Ffffghhhsh! ”

“Yeah.”

“Do you like more Buzz Lightyear or a Spiderman?”

And so on. When it comes to studying, he has the attention span of a gnat. Often he’ll become bored or frustrated with the task at hand and stop what he’s reading or writing to draw a crude picture of what is happening in the story or the sentence. One day we’re reading a story about two guys, Jack and Dave, who are fishing on a boat in a lake. Ryuji, clearly not riveted by the story, picks up his pencil and draws an interpretive study of Jack and Dave in the fishing boat. Actually, it looks like Jack going down on Dave on a surfboard, but I know what he’s getting at.

His favorite device for spicing things up during the writing exercises is the exclamation point. He uses it to innervate sentences that in his opinion are lacking in action and drama, which, of course, is every sentence without an exclamation point. Thus, we constantly end up with sentences like, “Jim ate pizza for dinner last night!!!!” and “The bird was flying high in the sky!!!!”

And at the end of every lesson, he makes me read to him from his favorite book, Captain Underpants and the Curse of the Wedgie Woman , which gives him his fix of innocuous toilet humor for the day. But before I read to him I always make him recite to me the Pledge of Allegiance, which he learned when he was at school in the States.

I pledge lesions to the flag

On night states America

And to recoldic

Which is sand

One nation

On the guide

Invisible

And seventeen justice graw.

Just like I used to say it.

So now, as part of my extracurricular schedule, I work with children, something I never thought I’d be doing and something that is allowing me to build useful future social skills, like patience, empathy, and the concocting of unique punishments for not doing what I ask. When I first imagined having to teach children, I thought of Medusa, the tattered redhead from Disney’s The Rescuers who in one scene has a helpful exchange with her sidekick Snoops regarding a young girl, Wendy, whom they’ve just kidnapped. It goes something like this:

Medusa: Snoops, you don’t have a way with children. You must gain their confidence, make them like you…

Snoops: Yeah? How do you do that?

Medusa: You force them, you idiot!

But though Japanese adults are much easier to convince of your likeability, especially after a few beers, you can’t force their children to like you. It just happens, either by happy accident or after a gradual wearing down of their steely willfulness. But even though it involves much less adulation and alcohol than my business classes, it’s a nice change of pace, especially when Kai insists on lecturing me, telling me that I’m old and I should already be married and that I might end up alone for the rest of my life if I don’t do it soon, especially if I don’t stop biting my nails and picking the dead skin off my fingers; or when Daisuke cross-examines me about my homeland with questions like, “Why America doesn’t have bullet train and only cars? It’s stupid. And why American people so fat?”