卒業会

On Sunday the Third Grade kids will all file into the gym and do exactly like they practised today and yesterday and all week and then file out into the sunshine with a rub of luck, or rain, and then they'll go and school will seem hollow until the next new kids arrive in April.

Last year the teachers had trouble moving along the kids after they'd filed out (into the sunshine, as it happened), as they all hung about in front of the school taking pictures of each other. This year the graduates aren't allowed to bring their own disposable cameras. I thought about sabotaging this and taking and handing out disposable cameras. It's the biggest day of their lives so far for fuck's sake, why can't they frame the memory?

More than last year, I feel bound up with these kids. I'm really going to miss some of them. 咲子 and 千夏 are two, both of whom have kept up a daily English diary since Christmas time or thereabouts. Given their workload, that's a real achievement. They talked about how nervous they were approaching exams, how relieved they were afterwards, anxieties and fears about going to High School and lots about really good Japanese sweet things and cakes and mochi.

Both of them are in 3-2 class, with whom I ate school lunch this week. It's on a weekly rotation but Ogisou Sensei told me on Monday that I could pick the class and had no hesitations choosing 3-2. I ended up sitting near 咲子　for their final school lunch and I could tell she was squirming in her seat, not knowing what to say to me. She'd written once or twice about how she was sorry she couldn't explain herself better in person on such and such an encounter when I would meet her in the corridor or the teacher's room. I guess written relationships don't always translate directly in person, but then, I can't think what else would drive you more to conquer a language and squash it out through clenched fist in slurs and slang and jokes and that.