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Several years ago, I arrived in Japan in July, along with many hundreds of other participants in the JET Program (the Japanese government’s expensive way of supporting the ongoing failure of their school children to learn English). It was exceptionally hot and I had several weeks to kill until term started in September. Thankfully, I was not forced to go to school every day like most of the other teachers I knew, and I got to hang out in my new apartment and get used to living in a strange land.
Term started and I was completely overwhelmed; I was the only foreigner working in a school of over one thousand students and one hundred teachers. I had never taught before, and the thought of facing classes of forty teenagers filled me with dread.
In the first week of term there was a sports day. As the foreign teacher, my duty was to stand around watching the proceedings while all the other teachers performed their allotted tasks. The afternoon began with the strange exercise routine that is so common in Japan. To a recorded sound track, I watched one thousand students in their PE kit go through the routine, some with vigour, and others displaying their obvious boredom. I was enjoying myself immensely and watched this strange ritual in fascination, silently congratulating myself on coming to Japan for what was to become an enormous and fascinating adventure.
Just when I thought things could not be any more surreal, the exercise routine stopped, and as the marching school brass band started to play, all the students organized themselves into team groups with a student at the front of each orderly line sternly holding a coloured flag. And the music the band was playing? In some ways it seemed incredibly appropriate, and in others a perfect example of how the Japanese simply “don’t get it”, as the music they did this to was The Liberty Bell by John Philip Sousa, better known as the theme tune to Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
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