Uniformity Check

They’re conducting uniformity checks at the junior high school today. Every student is getting measured and weighed. I feel like that kind of think never happened back in Canada when I was a kid, but maybe that’s my memory humoring me. Though these health tests have been long scheduled, I can’t help imagining them as crackdowns by the uniformity enforcers after the recent individualistic dissention among the student body.

You see, one of the single greatest hellraisers in my third year class (grade 9) dyed his hair the other day. Back in Canada, where we all have unique hair naturally, switching from one shade to another at will would hardly elicit a reaction from school officials. However, here in Japan, where hair colour is standard-issue, electing to change your mind about yours is a suspendable offence.

Honestly.

This student came to school with hair some shade of faux-blonde no different from the majority of the actors and j-pop stars and media personalities you come across on Japanese TV, but he was sent home for it. He was told that he could return to school when he had returned his hair to something better resembling its natural colour, and I picture one of the staff greeting him at the door upon his return, holding up a set of black hair swatches to his head, much like those used in the second world war to identify true Aryan blonde.

And this isn’t the first time it’s happened, either. A couple of my third year students last year were repeat hair offenders.

All of a sudden the kids freaking out about my blonde hair makes a little more sense. Because of how I was born, I get away with something they’d be sent home for.

The whole thing gives me a little more respect for this particular student. King hellraiser or not, he was looking to differentiate himself from the self-same, uniformed masses in one of the last ways left to him. When I was his age, I was coming to high school with snowcone vivid fuscia and aquamarine stripes across my scalp, and I was never subject to any kind of reprimand. He shows up with something similar to my hair colour, and he’s suspended. For an instant, I contemplate dying my hair black in a show of solidarity, but then maybe it would be I who was getting turned away at the door: sent home and told not to return until I looked a little more gaijin.

For all of my gaijin immunity, I’ve got a uniformity check of my own coming up in the next month or so. Every year Japanese teachers are subject to health testing, including blood testing. Many ALTs/JETs balk at such a practice, feeling that the medical tests are unwarranted to the point of being invasive. For my part, I didn’t much care, even going so far as to muse on the topic of what, exactly, the Japanese are doing with all of that gaijin blood they’re collecting (hybridizing the gaijin gene?). It was all one big laugh until I came in to my board of education on Monday and the office lady told me that my health test was coming up and I had the choice of either drinking barium and having the doctors X-ray my stomach, or drinking local anesthetic and having the doctors run a endoscope down my throat.

I asked her what this was all about, informing her that I felt fine.

“It’s preventative,” was her only response.

Craig tells me that they’re surely checking to see if I’m turning Japanese yet from all of the tasty Japanese food…that or they’re checking to see if they should extricate the alien they’ve implanted within me before it bursts out of my chest.