Where is the love?

One of the best things about the small international high school where I teach - in a suburb of Tokyo, for those of you keeping track - is the degree to which the students accept each other. In part this may be a product of circumstance, as many of our students come to us after failing to integrate into the tightly constrained mainstream of a Japanese public school. In our little corner of Saitama students have learned to accept each other with their differences intact, and this spirit of acceptance crosses ethnic divisions, even the traditional tension between Japanese and ethnic Koreans.

After three years of teaching in this climate of tolerance I had accepted it as the norm, as though our school were the mainstream, instead of a refuge from it.

So it was surprising and upsetting when one of the Korean boys in my Grade 11 ESL class missed class on Thursday because, as it turned out, he was assaulted on the morning train by a young, drunken salaryman (at 8:30) who took issue with his Korean-ness. The student did make it - eventually - shaken but unbloodied to school, but only after police intervention.

Maybe it's the recent fuss in China about Japan's revisionist middle school history textbooks. Or maybe this salaryman lost a girl to a Korean. Or maybe he was just born bad. Whatever the motive, this sudden, ugly intrusion of outside problems shook up our little enclave. I expect that our students will deal with this crisis the way the seem to resolve must such crises: with a kind of collective consciousness that, its maturity and consideration, puts the adult world to shame.

Rumi tells me that there's an urban legend afloat in Tokyo that Korean students in Japan will rise up and exact revenge on the Japanese for the abuses they've suffered here. Add that to "The Big One" we're waiting for. And the possibility that Mt. Fuji may come back to life one day....