INFLU

Monday October 5, 2009.

Plague masks out, kids.

What was a humorous one-liner last week appears to have fully descended on the schools of Furubira this week. I realized it when I walked into the teacher’s office of the elementary school on Monday, and I had the normally laughy-jokey Kyoto Sensei (vice principal) pretty much forcefully apply one of those sick masks to my face before I could breathe too much of the air unprotected.

INFLU, as the Japanese call it, had finally gotten its pestilent little claws on the schools in my town.

This wasn’t the first I had heard of it as the teachers had been throwing the word around for about a month now, but I had written the whole thing off as media-boosted heebie-jeebies, akin to what was going on in Canada before I left around the whole Swine Flu threat. However, when I rolled in on Monday and was informed that my awesome third grade class had all been quarantined at home, and the teachers (every last one of them with a plague mask on) were planning to close the rest of the elementary for a week at the end of the day, it was clear how seriously the town was taking this whole thing.

And the reaction at my junior high school was no different on Tuesday. Fortunately, the first victims of the seemingly sympathetic superbug were three of my favourite {sic} students. It was also decided that the second year class would be closed and sent home for the week at the end of the day. The teachers at the Jr. high weren’t wearing masks yet, but they might as well have been as their speech was already infected and every second word out of their mouths was “infruenza.”

For me, the whole thing resulted in a kind of half-assed holiday as I still had to show up for work, but I had no students to teach.

For the town, though, it has had a broader impact than expected.

Another second or third year JET had once told me that my town was dying. There was some truth in the statement as my town once had roughly 14,000 inhabitants but has since shrunk to only some 3,800 people. The high school I visit will be closing in two years, and the public kindergarten has already closed. And having this other JET pronounce this death sentence got me down for a bit as I began to dread the idea of spending a year or more in a “dying” town.

Then I took an objective look at the situation and realized that the JET was wrong. There was still life in this place, and that life took the form of 3- to 5-foot munchkins that ran along its streets and through its parks. I saw that as long as Furubira had children, Furubira would be alive.

Strangely, this whole INFLU thing has served to prove my observation.

On my morning walk to the junior high school, I cross paths with the patchy stream of elementary school kids flowing in the opposite direction toward their school. Where we meet, they invariably greet me with a “HARRO NIKORASU!”, and I reciprocate with a “goodmorning!” or “hello!” in a tone that is probably a little loud for first thing in the morning. I also come across their crossing guard, the jack-of-all-trades Nakamura Sensei. He always greets me cheerfully, forces the children to greet me in English, and then he wishes me a good day. The best word to describe the whole exchange is “Genki.” (Japanese for “energetic,” but, as with most Things Japanese, it means a good deal more than that)

But on Tuesday morning, with the elementary closed for the rest of the week, there were no loud elementary students, and there was no genki Nakamura Crossing Guard Sensei. The walk to work was quiet, uneventful, and the furthest thing from lively.

It was the same case at Kendo on Tuesday night. On Tuesdays and Thursday nights, the kendo dojo at the sports centre is usually filled with the screams of the kendo kids. Climbing the stairs to the dojo, I can hear the kids before I can see them. The stairs resonate with their laughter and the explosive impacts of the balls they whip around in their indecipherable version of dodge ball. The game passes for a warm up activity as they wait for their kendo senseis to arrive. When I walk in, the kendo kids assign me to one of the two teams, and the other team gets to delight in firing balls at my head.

But that Tuesday night, I walked up the stairs to the dojo in complete silence. I entered the half-darkened, empty room, and there wasn’t another soul around. It appeared that the quarantine instated at the elementary school extended to all of the students’ extra curriculars as well. I warmed up on my own and even had the opportunity to attempt something like meditation in the quiet room before the senseis showed up. As it was just me there with the two teachers, we were able to get down to some pretty intense sword fighting action, but it wasn’t the same without a gaggle of 3^rd to 5^th graders running interference. The class was far more serious and far less alive.

So maybe I was right. Maybe it is the case that Furubira survives so long as it has children flowing like life through the arteries of its streets. And should the town ever lose those children, like it did last week, it would slowly start to fade to a cold, dead thing.