Kakuta Haruo---Decoding Japan---

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Location: Sakai, Osaka, Japan

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Without Philosophizing, Chores Remain Chores

As often the case, my teaching career started at a “bottom” high school. There, and thereafter, I realized troubled kids are those who have troubles at home, and in the society at large.
Late one evening, I was talking with a student's parent. “I was illiterate when I was young. Later, I learned how to write and read, yet I can't help my child do homework. I wish I could.” Merely giving out homework might strengthen reproducing poverty, and strain some parental love.
Later on, I moved to a vocational high school. Some students chose the school because they can work right after the graduation. The choice had been nurtured by their domestic economy, namely poverty in this Japanese academic background-oriented society.
I saw a student's father only in their entrance ceremony. Her mother had left the family. Her father was almost always out form one construction site to another, and hardly came home with some money in his hand. The telephone service was sometimes stopped. Her younger brother was not attending his junior high school.
I sometimes paid home visits to dun her of the school tuition with an administrative staff, mostly only to find their room closed with nobody inside, even late at night. The visits were a kind of an alibi to show our efforts to the Board of Education.
My third type of encounter with poverty was teaching returnees from China. One female parent used to be an elementary teacher in China, but ended up making a cashier in Japan. Without Japanese fluency, they were regarded “illiterate.” Without Japanese licenses, they were treated as manual laborers, accordingly with low payment.
Students who have troubles, especially poverty, at home, have caused many troubles and problems on me. They actually and obviously increased my work load, which, on the other hand, would support their coming to school, going up social ladder.
During my career, I have read many books: some about buraku discrimination first, some others about Korean residents in Japan next, and then those about the poverty itself. Political Economical understanding helped me endure so called “chores” in educational institutions, a jargon which indicates routine works other than teaching.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Going around with sulfur in a hot humid laboratory

Two fans were stirring the June air in a chemistry laboratory. Don’t forget it that it was the Japanese June air in a century of global-warming.
After some introduction, Mr. Kaneda, a chemistry teacher, showed a demonstration experiment. The 20 students in the room, or 10 pairs of two, gathered around him in front of the lab in a half circle.
The teacher stroke a match, and lighted a Bunsen burner. The burner gave out and light-orange flame. “Not so good. It looks like the Olimpic Flame,” muttered him in a large voice. He turned a sleeve of the air vent till the burner provided a light-blue cone, which gives the heat of around 2,000 centigrade, according to him.
Mr. Kaneda put sulfur into a test tube, and carefully shuffled it with a test tube clamp so as that every part of its quarter bottom should get the heat all over.
“The sulfur liquefies, and becomes a light-yellow liquid. As you keep heating it in the heat of around 100 centigrade, it becomes dark black, and loses liquidity,” as he said, he poured the black matter into the water of a beaker. His Hermione-Granger-like skillfulness made the matter form a string of plastic sulfur in the water. The scene and the smell of the heated sulfur gave us the feeling as if we had been in a Potions class.
By the time, α-sulfur (in its orthorhombic system) and β-sulfur (in its monoclinic system) he had prepared revealed their crystal figures.
The students started their own performance, giving out the more of rotten-egg-like smell. With their Ronald-Bilius-Weasley-like clumsiness, their difference between α-sulfur and β-sulfur was not so crystal clear.