Typhoon, Turnip, Today

Today I woke up to a light rain that had been going for the past 2 days pretty solidly since I finally decided to demand that the sky bring us some rain. It worked a little too well. At 8:05 am, I walk into the sprinkle, and by 8:10 am I am soaked thoroughly. By the time I make it to the place where I am to be picked up, nothing on my person that I can find is dry enough to allow me to clear my glasses enough to allow vision. As I wait under a small bus shelter, the dryfit quickly dries to the point of wiping-but-not-cleaning, and as I return my glasses to my face for the 7th or 8th try to get them cleaned-off, I see Trang rounding the corner, waving as she comes. Apparently she is to be a fellow helper in "Kid's English" the camp that I decided to volunteer to assist in so as to try to return a favor to Kyoko Kawagoe the Everhelpful teacher and one of the most fluent native Japanese speakers of English on the island (she was the one who gave me tons of advice and in a way got me connected to the Taikyoken classes here at Miki). Kyoko is surprisingly a little late, probably from driving through the typhoon. Typhoon? Yep, when I got into the car, Kyoko asked me almost immediately but politely if I had watched TV this morning. I of course had not, as I have never once watched any in my house, but apparently every channel had been cut out by the government to inform the public that a Typhoon was in progress and to travel very carefully. Whoops! I missed the memo, it seems! Well, I had just unknowingly experienced my first Typhoon! Luckily I was too tired to notice more than the effort in putting one foot in front of the other on a path I knew well until I could get into the partial shelter of the bus stop. Kyoko was SHOCKED to find out that I had never once purchased, considered purchasing, or owned an umbrella (kasa) of my own once in my life, and had only probably used one on a dozen occasions. She suggested that I reconsider this thought. As we drove, we had to slow down to let the diversions of water that were overflowing the overflow system's overflow (from all of about 25 minutes of hard rain mostly, mind you) which included large lakes and a host of diversion systems into rice fields. (The rice field discovery is a recent one for me: pictured below are some pictures of the system.)


When we arrived at the Ministry of Education's deluxe classroom building, I met a number of people familiar to home, too familiar to home, and worldly and humbling. It seems that the director of this program, Kid's English, was none other than my own Japanese teacher who recently treated me to lunch at a nice restaurant! In the group of "assistants" like myself, we had: 3 Americans (one was Christopher, the other guy in my Japanese classes), 2 Australian, 1 Vietnamese (Trang), 1 German, 1 Spanish, and 2 Chinese, and one very late Canadian. We had a premeeting, which seems to be a fairly typical Japanese thing to do in group-coordination, then set out to play our parts.

I had been assigned the "main" role in a play called "The Big Turnip," and set in a group with a number of 6-10 year old kids who had memorize their lines already the previous night. (even at THIS age, they are excellent at rote memorization, a still-present ghost of when schools required everything "learned" to be in memorized format.) They all seemed to be unhesitant and never needed to look at the lines they were provided on the pages before them. Most didn't even practice with their notes or script in site! And they had never performed it once! Children are astounding. Never underestimate them. Especially the short ones! On my crew were Ann, an Aussie ALT that formerly taught Elementary Ed in Australia, but wanted to move into English (and who just got a job doing both in a local city!) She was our narrator. Also on our crew, a young woman from KUIS who played the main speaking role, that of a Man who planted a turnip and told it to grow big. We also had the best old-woman impersonator I've seen in a very long time, a 9 year-old girl, as well as a host of tiny restless yet dedicated little performers.

My role in "The Big Turnip": The Turnip. Convinced that making a performance fun for children starts with the adults having fun, and that making the experience contain not only the moral of the story, but also some humor to help them remember it by, I decided to consult with one of the teachers acting as director on ways I could spice up the Turnip's rather flat role of sitting with a meter-across turnip behind a wall until the ever-growing group trying to harvest me manages to pull the Turnip out, while I release the carboard cut-out. Not too exciting. (The whole story is basically of repeated attempts of the man who planted me trying to pull me out with the help of his granny, his daughters, his dogs, his cats, and finally some field mice coerced into helping pull on this turnip by the cats (who would probably eat them if they didn't help).

The moral of the story is an important yet simple one: If we ALL work together, from the bottom of the ladder to the top, we can succeed at even some of the greatest tasks: but without the help of even so weak a creature as a mouse, we might fall short of our societal harvests of life. I'm not being poetic enough for it, but in English I find it difficult to translate properly the Japanese moral with accuracy yet poetry. The working model of our group and how it functioned during the play itself proved to be proof of the moral of the story itself we were working out: Everyone worked in unison, with all lines memorized and fully prepared, and the barely-practiced presentation was ready to go, a short play, in a total of about 1 hour total practice for its performers!

The additions I mostly improvised into the play on our one-and-only run on-stage were as follows: As they pulled on me, I used my elastic face muscles to make a series of increasingly concerned, stressed, and finally "oh, I'm being abducted!" expressions. When the characters would pause in order to recruit further members to help pull me out of the earth, I would shake the gigantic radish back and forth, rotating it, while making my best evil villain deep-throated belly-laughter to the delight of the audience (both student and teacher). The turnip in this traditional story laughing in mocking delight as a ragtag team of humans and animals try to pull it out of the ground?! Apparently this was the spice that this old story might have needed, a rounded (literally and figuratively) villain, who struggles to keep from being killed by removal from the Earth and who laughs in the face of a mere mortal who would dare oppose his power, yet who manages to always end up obviously worried every time they do start pulling on him again, time and time again. When the Turnip finally comes out of the ground and I release the cardboard cutout, I also added a wine-cork "POP!!" sound from my lips, adding a moment of surprise yet humour to the otherwise simple act of a turnip coming out of the ground and the final narrative concluded the One-Act play.

A few shocked teachers came up to help me with my duty of removing stuff from the stage and (their hidden reason for coming to help me out of the natural order) to thank me for making the kids laugh and fall down in the audience, as well as to ask me where in the world I learned how to make a character with no lines the central source of entertainment in a One-Act theatre production in less than an hour, in which I told them the truth: I had some limited theatre and film experience and I felt I had to make the character fun for everyone in order to make it fun for my small troupe and our audience. I didn't get to stay proud for very long though: the 5-language proficient 21 year old master violinist from Germany came up and flawlessly excecuted Mozart's 9th in an increased tempo without a single flaw of any kind and a number of stylized improvements that made me blink when I tried to look at what her hand were doing, thus putting me back into my normal-feeling place.

Later, I we went to take the large array of pictures that are required for every social event in Japan, taking us about 4 minutes in assorted arrangements. I of course grabbed the turnip to cover much of my body, and in a moment where we were all supposed to hold hands in an arc for one, I had Lucky and a friendly Spainiard hold the turnip instead. This kids need something different to remember everything they can by! I will shamelessly mix drama, improvisation, and tradition in order to achieve it!

Finally when it was all over, I was approached immediately by KUINS' highest man-in-charge that I had met to date, who told me he was very impressed and came as close to begging as a super-superior status-holding Japanese person ever may, begging me to participate in further events if at all possible.

And I was afraid I'd lost touch with the kids! The old Planetarium-watchdog has still got it! If nothing else I would have done it again for Mozart's 9th, Chinese Opera singing, and to see Trang do a short performace of a traditional Vietnamese song (which, in contrast to spoken, brash Vietnamese is like a beautiful bird-call that I am almost conviced is beyond the abilities of native English speakers like me. Trang is pictured bellow in her traditional Vietnamese Long Dress, obviously thrilled from having just had a chance to exercise her vocal chords for an audience. Who would have the the fragile red-eyed little thing could sing like that? She's too tiny to have any serious lung capacity). Also, this whole experience was fun! The kids were great. I only had one boy try to assault me with a kitty-ears head-band, and even that was too ridiculously cute, (nay, kawaii!) for me to not enjoy the attack before I returned his attention to practicing the play. Also...this was rewarding for me on a number of other levels. The kids were impressive, the other plays were excellent, the fellow teachers and assistants were fabulous, I got free giant Miki grapes, time to do some quick theatre-making, the reward of congratulations from so many respected teachers, making it fun for the kids...it had been a big day in less than 4 hours!