Roof Off-Tearing

From the Raku Three's concert last Saturday night. Our audience, though small, was enthusiastic, and I think we played better than we ever had before. Apologies for the feedback in the second and third numbers; we couldn't get the mike quite right again after our guest vocalist finished her songs. Enjoy!

Owe My Soul to the [Redacted]

Hard to believe it, but it's been an entire year since I first started working at the kindergarten. There have been times where I've thought that I could be perfectly happy doing this job for my whole life -- these would be the times where I'm getting hugged by my favorite students and getting adorable photos or pictures from them, as seen in the last post -- and then there are the times where I can't shake the urge to just bolt out of the room and announce my resignation. That's mostly just during meetings, though. Something that's been rather trying the last few weeks has been that the school has come down with a bad case of the Meetings. Morale meetings, attitude meetings, posture meetings, weekend meetings, evening meetings, meetings about other meetings. Plenty of time to sit and think about what all this was like last year.

I think one of the major differences between last year and this year is that a year ago I was still fresh from unemployment. A reason to be awake and wearing my suit? Yes please! All the general suckiness and bowing and pretending-to-give-a-shit was easy because it was novel. It was crazy, it was vaguely demeaning, but hell, it was an interesting cultural experience, right? Something I'd never done before! Now, though, after a year of seeing the same kind of ritualistic offering of one's body and soul to the company, it wore a bit thin.

As with last year, I'm not at liberty to divulge much of the meeting's contents; in fact, there was a warning by the principle that we need to discover who keeps leaking sensitive information about our Mission Plan and such to the parents, as they apparently shouldn't know this stuff. So, here are a few juicy tidbits of kindergarten intel that I'm assuming is not classified. This is the real, hand-to-Buddha educational philosophy of Enchou-Sensei, our beloved principal, as revealed to us over the course of the meeting and the pre-meeting meetings. Behold, the fuel in the kindergarten machine!

1. Japanese children are for shit these days. They can't stand very hot or cold temperatures, probably because they're always being coddled with heating and air conditioning. And they can only pay attention for a few minutes!
2. They're also really weak because they keep eating so much meat and wheat-based products.
   
3. Japan being a wealthy country, everyone only thinks of themselves and not of others, especially in Osaka.
4. The solution is for educators to teach their students to have good hearts, even emphasizing moral enlightenment over teaching ability.
5. As such, the foundation of our education is to make sure our students feel that they are loved and to teach them to show that love to others.
6. Love is expressed in proper posture and bowing. THE END.

In addition -- and I do hope that I'm not divulging any sensitive company information here -- did you realize that if you don't eat meat, your poop will be gold-colored? This was a fairly major point in our principal's yearly talks, and we heard it repeated a number of times (it came as something of a surprise to my vegetarian co-worker and me, too). To unpack this concept as it relates to the kindergarten: Japan as a culture is meant to eat rice and vegetables -> meat is more popular now, but it's not as healthy -> meat contains what we need to have a competitive, fighting spirit -> obviously we shouldn't give up meat altogether, but still, hey, gold poop.