3.14 Enviable

Arriving at the “culture center” where I taught Saturday mornings, I got a stark reminder at what was at stake.

Less than a hundred yards away and in clear view from the windows of the fifth floor classroom where I conducted my classes was the FukuokaKôchisho, the very jail I was hoping to avoid getting thrown into.

The kôchisho was enclosed with an old concrete wall, some forty or fifty feet high, with a bramble of razor wire at the top. Just beyond the wall, the top floor of the cellblocks was visible. In all the years I had taught at the “culture center” and looked out at the kôchisho, I never once garnered a hint of life beyond the bleak enclosure.

All I knew about the jail was that prisoners were sometimes hanged there, the executions made public only after they had been conducted. There were no countdowns, or protests, or candlelight vigils, or dramatic eleventh hour stays of execution. This wasn't Hollywood, after all. It was Japan, where humorless bureaucrats oiled the machinery of justice. The extinguishing of human life was a fittingly impersonal affair, a tick in a ledger in governmental office in Tokyo.

I worried that in less than twenty-four hours I might become a tick in a ledger myself: my interrogation with the Japanese Drug Enforcement Agency and Customs was scheduled for nine-thirty the following morning.

“You have nothing to worry about,” Adachi had told me Thursday afternoon. Big of him to say that! The lawyer wasn’t the one who was going to get the third degree, or have his head slammed up against the wall, or receive an education in the subtleties of a nightstick. Whatever happened I was sure I’d be seeing stars by day’s end if blew it.

I needed to get in touch with my cousin again. I had tried twice before I left for the culture center, but no luck. I still hadn’t worked out what I would tell the cops when I went in for questioning. If I could talk with Naila, and get her to corroborate, well then, I really would have nothing to worry about.

Swallowing hard, I turned away from the window and sat down on the corner of my desk and waited for the students to arrive.

At a quarter to ten, they began trickling in, filling the classroom with their sunny chatter. The pensioners didn’t seem to have a care in the world, aside from bum knees, cataracts, and memory loss. Some of them, the older ones in particular who were in their eighties and still going strong had lived through the horrors of the war--one had even experienced the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, another had been training to become a kamikaze pilot as the war was coming to an end--but you’d never know it from the way they smiled as they entered the classroom.

Jean had once said that he didn’t know how I could bear to spend so much time every week with so many losers. I suppose if I also operated under the same opinion that my students were losers, I probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as I had in the profession. At the risk of my friend’s derision, I must confess that I actually liked the vast majority of my students, and, for the most part, enjoyed the time we spent together each week. Would I have rather been doing something different? Definitely. But for all intents and purposes, the job suited my lifestyle and placed few demands on me other than I show up, do my thing, and collect my pay.

Now that the kôchisho was looming in the offing and I risked losing everything, this teaching gig included, there wasn’t anywhere I would have rather been than in that classroom chatting it up with pensioners about their enviably ordinary and peaceful lives.

I asked a diminutive woman by the name of Hideko (lit., child of the rising sun) if she had done anything special that week. At the age of sixty-three, she was a veritable spring chicken, compared to the others.

“Last week, I went to shopping,” Hideko began.

“Went shopping,” I corrected.

“Yes, yes. I went to shopping and . . .”

“No, Hideko, it’s not went to shopping, it’s went shopping.” I said. God only knows how many times I had corrected the group on this very point.

“Huh?”

“I went shopping.”

“You, too, Sensei?”

Oh, good grief. “No, no, no. Not me. You!”

“Yes, that's what I said,” she countered with a smug smile.

“Never mind. Please continue.”

“Last week, I went to shopping and . . . “

When she was finished with her story, I wrote “go to ~ ing” on the whiteboard with the “to” crossed out in red. Below it, I added several examples: “go hiking”, “go swimming”, “go fishing”, and finally “go shopping”.

After running quick run-through of the grammar, Hideko finally figured out what I had been trying to tell her. What’s more, she also realized that she had made the very same mistake only a week earlier, adding that she was sorry.

“No, no, it's quite alright,” I assured the woman. “There’s no need to apologize. This is my job, after all. A gardener pulling weeds.”

“Oh, thank you. Thank you.”

“Besides there are no stupid mistakes . . .” 

“No?”

“No, there aren't any stupid mistakes, but there sure are a lot of stupid students.” 

“Sensei!”

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The complete version of No. 6 is now available for a variety of devices at Amazon's Kindle store.