So, I’m leaving the school for the day and Michael, the Nepalese newbie, is out front, surrounded by a group of his Japanese classmates. It  looks pretty confrontational so I move in to investigate. As I get closer I realize that no one is saying anything. Everyone seems poised to speak, eager to communicate, but there’s no conversation. It almost looks like they’re sizing one another up, Michael versus the group.

“What’s going on here?” I ask in Japanese.

“Nothing,” Hideki (not his real name) says. He seemed to be the leader of the Japanese boys. The girls stood off to side, but were tuned in.

I could see they all had questions that needed answers but none were forthcoming due to this language problem, and a bit of frustration had set in. Hideki actually looked a bit peeved like if Michael were purposely being evasive. Without answers, there was no way to really get a fix on the kid, which has more advantages than disadvantages, particularly if you’re a leader (and possibly a bully…I had my suspicions about Hideki. The other boys always seemed inordinately cautious around him).

“I need to see Ms. Natsumi,” Michael says, in that barely comprehensible English of his.

“I just left her in the teacher’s office,” I told him.

His face took on a quizzical quality for a brief moment before returning to deadpan, but in that moment, I could see he was struggling with my English and he didn’t want to let on that he couldn’t, to me nor the other students.

I pointed to the school.

“She’s inside.”

“OK.”

“See ya later” I said with a salute, and headed home.

*****

I was about half a block away, just getting back into a review of contemporary Iranian cinema on my favorite podcast Filmspotting, when I saw a non-Japanese man walking towards me. He looked Middle Eastern for a sec, and I was thinking what were the odds, but as he got closer I could see he looked more like a mix of Indian and Asian…

Like a certain new student of mine…it couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi!” he said, smiling broadly and in a way I was very familiar with. It was the same smile many Japanese people brandish when I speak to them, kind of diffident and reverential. “Are you a teacher at the junior high school?”

“Yes.”

“My son told me about you. Loco-sensei right?”

“That’s correct.”

His English was at about the same level as his son’s, maybe worse.

“Hajimemashite…” he said, and bowed a bit as I stuck out my hand. He certainly didn’t seem like he’d just arrived in-country, I thought as I uncomfortably returned the greeting and bow.

“You seem like you’ve been in the country for quite a while. But your son said he’d only been here a short time.”

The look on his face revealed he was not processing my words at all. An expression I’ve become accustomed to over the past 10 years, regardless of what language I’m speaking, but especially when I’m speaking English. So I took a chance and repeated my thoughts in Japanese.

His face lit up! And he blasted me with fluent Japanese, saying he’d been living in Japan for 15 years and owned a curry shop in Yokohama. He’d just sent for his son recently cuz he wanted him to have a Nepalese cultural foundation before coming here. That made sense. He’d certainly be hard-pressed to have one if he’d been raised from infancy in Japan no matter how ethnocentric his home life was.

Relaxed now, he told me about his restaurant and some of the challenges of his life here.

“Yeah, I can identify, ” I said. While there are some variants to the gaijin experience in Japan, and how that experience is perceived, there are also many similarities.

Just then, Michael pulled up beside us on his bike and said something to his father in, I presume, Nepalese.

Dad’s anger flashed to the surface as he turned sternly on his son and hissed something. All that ultra-Japanese customer service-oriented pleasantness melted away, and his voice took on a disciplinary edge that made me feel like I was intruding. Abruptly he switched from that unidentifiable language to careful and simple Japanese.

Michael stood there under this glare trying to process his words, grasping at familiar vocabulary and scratching his head at the unfamiliar. And when he responded he caught me off-guard. His Japanese was actually not-too-bad for only a few weeks! He had put together several sentences that were really impressive to my gaijin ears.

But why had he been pretending not to understand anything in front of the school? At his level, while he couldn’t hold a full-on conversation, he could certainly answer some rudimentary questions.

Hmmmm…

His father turned to me and his smile returned.

“He must learn Japanese quickly if he is to excel in school here,” he said in Japanese. “Of course, all of his classes, except yours, are in Japanese, and none of the teachers speak Nepalese…and, anyway, our English is not so good.”

“Yeah, I was wondering how he was going to manage.” Not that English would have helped much cuz none of the teachers really spoke English at a level where they could teach, say, a subject like science or math in English, that’s for sure. Then, something occurred to me. “Are you teaching him Japanese?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling, almost proudly. I wondered if the irony was lost on him. “He’s also taking Japanese classes after school. But it’s super difficult because none of his teachers know Nepalese, so I must help. But I’m just teaching him the basics…”

And clearly he was picking those basics up admirably.

Micheal looked at me nervously. Was he worried that I’d expose his tri-lingual secret to the other students? He had nothing to worry about in that respect. I kinda understood how he felt. It’s actually not a bad idea to control information about yourself that impacts your experience as much as language does here. I’ve known many students, particularly some of the Chinese students when I used to work in Chinatown, who have played dumb about both their English and Japanese abilities.

Then Michael peeked behind me…and I understood the real reason for his nervousness…

I turned to find several of my students standing there gawking in unabashed amazement. They’d been on their way home, but had stopped for this spectacle. Apparently they’d overheard the father and I, and Michael, talking.

It’ll be all over the school before homeroom tomorrow.

But that didn’t capture my imagination as much as this: Three foreigners having a discussion in Japanese had to be one of the strangest, most unexpected scenarios these kids had ever seen in their short lives.

I wondered how their minds were processing it. Would it be the catalyst to a paradigm shift, like the first time they’re successful at resisting peer-pressure, or stored away as merely anomalous, like that “A” grade on a math test which became an island in a sea of “C”s?

I guess we’ll know one day…

Loco