Teachers Prepare for Migration

Migration of the Teachers: Part I – Preliminaries

It’s the last full week of school (if you don’t count Vernal Equinox… a stupid idea for a holiday but a grand idea for a day off!) The teachers are finding out over the phone whether or not they will be working at their respective schools for the next school year. Many of them won’t be. Oddly enough (and happily for me) quite a few of the teachers are swapping from Honjo to Ine, and from Ine to Honjo. This means I won’t be devoid of their smiling faces or strange conversations. It’s good that I am able to keep the people I know, as they are few and far between.

However, as I had prepared myself for, my most fluent JTE, Tsuji-sensei, will be leaving me. She has tears in her eyes this morning… I think that while she is happy with the news, she is going to be fairly heartbroken when she leaves this school and this little community. Tsuji-sensei came to Honjo JHS six years ago. I believe she was fresh out of college, where she majored in French and learned English on the side. As such, she is certified to instruct both English and French. I have to mention that her English is phenomenal. For someone who has learned English solely inside of Japanese Universities, her skill and the level of conversation she has progressed to is top notch. She says this is because her former university professor is British. Be that as it may, it was always a breath of fresh air speaking with Tsuji-sensei. I honestly feel sometimes that she is the only person who can understand me (as an English speaker and as a person) in this town. In the summer that brought me to Japan, Tsuji-sensei married her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, also Tsuji-sensei, worked at the elementary school in Honjo for some years. He currently works in Kyoto city with handicapped learners. This means that the Tsujis are married and live about three hours of driving apart, which also means that Mrs. Tsuji (my JTE) travels to Kyoto city almost every weekend (read: every weekend she is not at work).

So, for her, transferring is a great relief. Wherever she is sent, odds are it will be infinitely closer than where she is now. Honjo is so distant from the city our prefecture is named after that people in Shiga, Hyogo, Fukui, and Osaka are able to reach it must faster. One hopes that she will actually be able to live with her husband at some point, too. I suppose she’d like that as well!

In the next few weeks I will have to say goodbye to a lot of my colleagues. I suppose the only consolation is knowing that the teachers are generally better off where they are in comparison to Honjo or Ine. Also, in early April we will be receiving the new first years (fresh out of elementary school), which will be my new breath of fresh air.