I Was Honored to Have Given Doraemon My Head

I should warn you up-front: I'm in a dangerous mood tonight--I feel like blogging and have nothing to say. What you do with this knowledge from here on out is your own business. I won't be held responsible (at least I hope not).

I have my own English conversation classroom at school, called the ECR (as you know if you've read any of my reason posts). There are 18 classes at my school, so theoretically each desk, except for a few in the back, have about 18 different occupants weekly. That makes these desks uniquely suited for recording the history of my classroom. I like to think these desks tell a unique version of history--like a Rosetta stone or cave drawings, almost indecipherable to anyone except that arcane group for and by whom they were produced. Ever so often, I go around with an eraser and blot out the recent annals of my classroom. This gives me a good excuse to intrude upon these esoteric writings, which tell a history of my classroom from a perspective very different from my own.

I don't even know who the historians of the desk annals are. During class I often furtively scan the terrain, trying to notice, undetected, those select, peerless few who have been chosen to recount the history of the ECR. But to me they remain phantoms--unreal, unknowable, beyond grasp, yet their existence made undeniable by the signs they leave.

Today, I saw, written on a desk in the Japanese syllabary used for foreign words: "Wai Emu Shi Ei." I was momentarily puzzled before decoding the enscription's secret meaning: Y-M-C-A. It brought a tear to my eye to think that all over this country, maybe, probably, somewhere, the most sacred treasures of American pop culture are being transcribed on many a hard surface.

Somtimes the messages are less than subtle, however. I've mentioned it before on this blog, but it's worth repeating. Once I found this sentence written in clear English on a desk in the front row: "Don't overfriendly with me."

Today I saw a picture, drawn on a student's worksheet, of a famous comic book character, Doraemon (a rather feisty cat--I think). At this particular moment in time, Doraemon had a spear in his hand, and on that spear was the severed head of a man wearing glasses and smiling most sincerely. I may have misinterpreted this sign, but I couldn't help but notice that the impaled head bore a striking resemblance to that of my own. In spite of myself, I laughed out loud. I suppose I would've been concerned had it been a gory picture, but it was actually a rather pleasant one. Instead of the disconnected neck having dangling bones and dripping blood, as one might expect, it had a perfectly rounded ring at the bottom, like you see when you accidentally remove the head of a toy figurine. In fact, the whole head had the look of well-shapen plastic. I was honored to realize this student thought so highly of me: Even after horrible mutiliation, here was I, my "genki" smile fully intact, coupled with my comic-book-sized larger-than-life personna. And believe me, in Japan you just don't get any bigger than being a comic book hero. Or a villain. Maybe someday you can become one too. Don't give up just yet.