Yesterday the entrance exam results were posted. There were screams of delight and tears of disappointment and parents striking children for not getting into their first choice schools and news cameras recording it all. Eh...okay, the crying and striking parts are made up, but everything else is true. So there I was sitting at my desk minding my own business living my life when I hear this high pitched scream coming from outside. I jump up and spin around to see hordes of people (read a group of about 20 people) and I see middle school students in their uniforms gathered around a huge white board. The girls are screaming and jumping and running to hug their friends and family pleased with the posted results. The boys are less enthusiastic, but that could be because they're boys or because they didn't get in (remember, there were no tears to indicate utter disappointment).
Later I was at the convenience store next to my school getting a very late breakfast with a teacher. When we walked in we noticed there were some of the junior high school boys standing with an older boy not in uniform who was smoking. When we were leaving, my teacher friend went around the corner of the building to find several boys there smoking. Since drugs are not a big problem here (yet) smoking is. It is really sad to find these students who aren't even in high school, yet, smoking. Here in Japan when a students gets in trouble it's the school and not the parents who are called first. For example, a student was caught drinking one weekend and the police called the school. I don't know why that is, but it seems everyone is used to the idea of teachers being the punishers and protectors instead of the parents as was illustrated in the smoking event above. When my teacher friend made the boys disperse, one went to talk to a woman sitting in a car who was waiting for her friend. It turned out that the woman was the parent of one of the boys. This particular boy was not smoking, but when my teacher friend asked if she knew the boys her son was friends with, she said, "no." I thought that was really naive on her part. Just because her son isn't smoking in front of her, does she really believe he doesn't when she's not around when all of his friends do? Wouldn't she want to know his friends when she can see for herself that they might not be the best influence on her son?
Oh, and on the subject of drugs: Like I said, drugs are not as prevalent here as they are back home. I mean, at my school, at least once a month I could walk down the hall, pass a student rest room, and smell marijuana smoke emanating from it. Here, it's cigarette smoke, and while drugs are the rampant, one can still see drug paraphernalia everywhere, mainly marijuana. One can see marijuana shaped car air fresheners in cars driven by little old ladies, marijuana pencil cases carried by students, clothes, etc. It's really strange. More so because it's not well-known that that's what it is--at least that's what I've seen so far. It is quite possible that the students know very well what it is they are carrying and wearing, but the reverse may also be true. I say this because I teach an adult conversation class. Last week we read an article about the drug policy here in Japan as it has been in the news here the past few months with college students and sumo wrestlers being caught with pot. When I brought up the fact that the Japanese have zero tolerance for drugs but that one can see paraphernalia everywhere, the Japanese teachers had no clue what I was talking about. One teacher had even spent the past two years in America and didn't know what image I was talking about. They do some education here about not doing drugs, but I think it pretty much amounts to saying "don't do drugs" and putting up cute, yet bizarre, posters about not doing drugs because they make you feel yucky.
