MY LIFE WITH THE NANKING MASSACRE

written by Pemmican

		In Siberia

The desk that I was given, when I first arrived, was, as I was told it would be, off in the far corner, with the desks of the part-time and temporary teachers. "In Siberia," I would joke; but actually, I kind of liked it. It was close to both the computers and the tiny little lounge/sofa area, so if I didn't feel like working, it was easy to discreetly do something else. I was out of the way of the bustle and activity of the shokuin, part of the group and yet blessed with a bit of privacy. "My corner." Yeah, I liked it.

As for the school… I have to be careful. I don't want certain teachers having any reason to think I'm writing about MY school. I have a little bit of paranoia in me, that the wrong person will read this and be offended, make my life difficult, etc. Suffice it to say that we're neither in the country nor the city. The area immediately around the school is mostly residential or devoted to small family farms. Lots of rice. At the same time, we're less than an hour by train to one of the larger cities in Japan, and have access to all the conveniences of city life in the shops around the train stations. No shortage of restaurants, CD stores, internet cafes, all the things that make for a comfortable life. At the same time, it's rural enough that I can make a pastime of looking for frogs along the edges of the rice paddies as I cycle to and from school. The quality of the school, the "level" of the kids, is likewise somewhat in the middle of the spectrum. The kids aren't violent, or stupid, or hostile (mostly) - they're generally fairly friendly and well-behaved. They sleep in class, or peek at their keitais and their manga, but they don't usually act out in any extreme way. Some of the more status-conscious boys burn themselves with cigarettes to prove they're cool, and I gather that ijime (bullying) does go on, though I've never seen any evidence of it. Mostly they're okay. They aren't academic wonders, though. Very few of them speak anything but the most rudimentary English - and by rudimentary I mean greetings and occasional set phrases like "Oh yeah!" A lot of them don't care at all for studies of any sort. I've heard the school called a lower-level academic high school. That seems accurate enough. I'm the only ALT there.

I only had to make a few brief appearances that August - was given time to relax and get my bearings before school started. I made a few trips in, anyhow - as soon as I figured out, with much help, how to cycle to and from the school. I brought in my teacher's books, the Collins Cobuild grammar, the prepositions workbook, the GRADED ENGLISH DRILLS - all the material I'd figured I'd need as a "teacher." (I still thought that that was what I'd been hired to do). I set them up on my desk. I made sure I was well-supplied with pens and pencils and paper, even brought in a box of tissues. Outfitting my desk, getting ready. I was excited, anticipatory; homesickness and fear were balanced nicely by the thought that soon I would be really teaching, that my career in ESL would be underway... If nothing else had to be done, somedays, when I went in, I would just sit at my desk reading. The Chrysanthenmum and the Sword, The Japanese Mind, Culture Shock: Japan… Lafcadio Hearn… All that good stuff…

One day I was sitting at my desk when a teacher came over. He was about fifty. The first things I noticed about him were a somewhat servile, self-mocking manner and a big grin, that revealed The Worst Teeth I Have Ever Seen - some just little stubs, others capped, as much gold and black in that mouth as there was white. He grinned at me in a shy, conspiratorial way and sat down in the vacant seat beside me. "Hello! I Hara." (I'm going to call this fellow Hara, though that isn't his name). "Is now okay?"

I nodded, smiled. We hadn't spoken before. He wasn't an English teacher. He was the first non-English teacher to show any ability to use English.

"I have something… Is my hobby." He placed a book down in front of me. A school notebook that he'd filled. Haiku and tanka, translated into English. "Haiku - you know?"

He explained that he wanted to learn "beautiful English" from me to help him with his translations. Then he flipped quickly through the pages of his book and showed me a specific haiku, printed out carefully in block letters.

Summer is over
Burning those books and papers
I must go somewhere.

"Is for you," he said. "You leave your country, come here…" And he grinned again, showing me those bad, bad teeth. I was absurdly touched. I thanked him, scribbling the haiku down on a piece of paper, so I could tell my folks about it. It was the sweetest gesture anyone had made towards me since I'd arrived. But he apologized, said we would talk later, and disappeared, as quickly and unexpectedly as he'd arrived. Hara. Clearly an eccentric fellow, but likable.

		Getting Involved

September came. The job began. I went through my self-introductions, making a simple game of them. I stared out at students with ridiculously long hair, no socks or shoes, untucked shirts, baggy pants. I said "good morning" to gaggles of giggling girls, who would say "good morning" back then run away. Some of the teachers were friendly and likable. One of my coworkers, a younger fellow named Ishikawa, helped me get my apartment set up. He came over to show me how to use the phone, to explain the controls on my washing machine. I didn't want to ask him for too much, but I felt glad that there was someone I could trust if I needed help or advice. Other teachers that I worked with were slower to warm to me. One female teacher seemed to want total control of the class, would criticize any lesson plan I'd come up with, and basically just wanted me to stand in the corner and read from the textbook when called upon. Another teacher seemed reasonably friendly towards me, but was given to throwing temper tantrums in class, yelling at the students for the whole hour while I sat feeling embarrassed in the background, wondering if we would actually have a lesson. It would take some getting used to, but I was determined to prevail, no matter how patient, how deferential, how crafty I was required to be.

Hara invited me to sit in on one of his history classes. Somewhere in the JET literature someone had said something about this sort of thing - get involved with other teacher's classes, not just English teachers'. I did. He was doing a unit on Helen Keller. It was good to see that the students looked just as bored and apathetic in his class as they did in mine. After the class, he brought out a big poster with photographs on it, clipped from magazines, of people from different ethnic groups. Australian aborigines, Hindus, Latinos. He unrolled it on the desk. "I use picture," he said. "The students all - history is no interesting. Have no patiency, no curiosity. Only Pikachu. Only TV game." (He made a hand gesture to illustrate playing TV games.) Hara pointed to one person - "You know?"

"Inuit, isn't he?"

Hara broke into a grin. I think that was the first time he hit me on the back - a gentle series of punches that he uses to commend someone for a clever performance. Thump thump thump. "Are! You know! You have WIDE knowledge! So smart!"

It hadn't been a particularly difficult task. I didn't recognize a few of the other ethnicities represented and asked about them.

Later, before I left the room, Hara gestured for me to come closer. "Is important. Very secret. You ENGLISH teacher. You work with English teacher. I history teacher. Must be DISCREET. Use discretion, we. We talk, we laugh, we know each other - other English teacher get upset, if they see. 'He HISTORY teacher,' they say. Why? Why he talk with our ALT?" I got him to explain this again. English teachers would be jealous if they saw me socializing with a history teacher? Somehow I didn't think so. I didn't know what the fellow was up to, but I didn't think he was being completely honest. His manner with me already seemed too friendly; I wondered if something was up. I decided to be somewhat careful with him. I sent an e-mail to a friend, who was convinced, based on what I'd said, that this guy must be homosexual, must want to get it on with me. That didn't seem quite like it, either, though.

Hara launched a campaign to get to know me. Over the next two months, he invited me repeatedly to socialize with him. He told me his daughter would be going to New Zealand and needed advice; would I come to his house and talk with her? I arrived, to discover that the daughter had absolutely no interest in speaking with me at all, and that Hara had planned that I would eat lunch with him. His wife cooked. She served chilled sashimi straight from the icebox that I nearly gagged on. His male children hung around a bit, but mostly were interested in playing computer games and watching TV. He showed me his family home, down the street from his current house, that day. He explained that his parents had been farmers, and that his family had lived in this place for hundreds of years, until his mother and father died. His mother in law still was a farmer, he said. After lunch, we drove to her farm and picked a watermelon, which we ate together, with salt… It was a fun day, and I did my best to come off as polite and friendly and eager to communicate. Hara took a few more pictures of me than seemed warranted, but it didn't really matter.

On another occasion, Hara told me he wanted to see my home. That seemed strange. He put it like that - "I want to see your apartment." No other teachers had made such a request. I tried to dissuade him - the place wasn't very clean or interesting, I didn't really have anything to show him -- but he persisted. Giving in, I drew him a map; but he decided he preferred to follow me. He drove along the narrow roads as I cycled home. He'd stop every couple of blocks along the way and wait for me to pass. It was ridiculous, and I couldn't figure out the point of it. He seemed to want me to be maximally aware of the trouble he was taking to visit, or else to not let me out of his sight; all so he could see my apartment? When I invited him in, he sat, smiling on the sofa, and just seemed delighted to be there with me, like it was a vast novel experience, to be in a foreign person's place.

I didn't know what to do. I looked over my bookshelves, looked at the few CDs I'd picked up since moving in. What, that I had, might a history teacher be interested in? I played him some reggae music and tried to explain how I was interested in the ways Jamaican culture seized on American pop forms and transformed them. Maybe Japanese pop would eventually do the same thing, stop imitating the west and become unique. He smiled. He had no idea what I was saying, no interest. He just wanted to be in my apartment.

On another occasion, he wanted to show me some temples and shrines on the other side of the prefecture. We spent the day sightseeing. He must've taken a dozen photos - me in front of this shrine, me in front of that shrine. He wasn't taking these to give them to me, either. I figured that he must have really wanted a foreign friend for a long time, to be this excited. As we walked about the grounds of each shrine, he explained certain kanji or statues or so forth to me. His manner remained vaguely self-deprecating, in a charming way. One time, after he had plucked a long stem of grass and was twirling it about in front of himself, to clear spiderwebs from our path, he explained that this was a symbol used in Noh theatre to designate madness. He called it "my crazy symbol." On another occasion, when he had run a red light, he turned to me, chuckling, and said, "I illegal driver. I have gold license, I never have accident, but is only because I lucky! They say, you good driver, you never have accident, but really I ILLEGAL!" He gave a big grin and zoomed around a corner as I tried to look calm.

I had noticed a teacher putting union leaflets on other teacher's desks. I'd read somewhere that the Japanese school system tended to be dominated by the left. I asked him about this.

"Yes. Is true. The union was very strong. Was. Used to be. Now not so much."

That day ended at an onsen, a public bath. I didn't want to go there. He was proving himself to be a skilled manipulator. If he suggested something, and I said flatly I wasn't interested, he'd just go ahead with it anyhow, and put me in a position where I either had to be rude, or else go along with him. Perhaps he was just adept at listening selectively - only capable of hearing the answers that went along with what he wanted to hear. In any case, I didn't want to onsen with the guy. I don't come from a culture where two naked men share a bathtub, no matter how big or hot it is. My buddies' warning that the guy must be gay flickered through my mind. I ended up onsening with him nonetheless. The water was stifling hot and I could only bear a ten minute soak. He didn't do anything untoward, though.

At around this point, he began to become a bit of a nuisance. I'd be smoking - I was smoking back then - in the smokers' area chatting with another teacher, and Hara would come in, pat my shoulder, give a big grin, and ask me about a word he wanted to use, or thank me for the other day, or so forth - giving no regard for the fact that I had been talking with someone else. He'd occasionally do this while I was trying to help a student practice English. If I could help him find the word he was looking for, he'd go through paroxysms of enthusiasm - "Ohh, you smart! You have WIDE knowledge!" - which just didn't seem warranted. If I explained that I was a little busy, he would seem slightly indignant, go away, then return in five minutes. If I was getting annoyed by the constancy of his requests for my attention, I have to admit that I also appreciated them a little, since no other teachers were showing interest in getting to know me in this way. They certainly weren't as enthusiastic or demonstrative. Hara and I became buddies of a sort, mostly because I couldn't think of any particular reason to refuse him.

		A Second Opinion

One night, however, Ishikawa, the helpful and friendly English teacher, suggested we go drinking with each other, so he could "hear my complaints." I don't know if this was spontaneous on his part or not, but I was glad to go out with him.

After a few beers, I opened up to him. X-teacher is too temperamental, Y-teacher treats me like a "human tape recorder," the textbooks are crap, there's no curriculum, and no one really seems to want me to teach. Other than that, everything was dandy. We covered these topics at length, eating, drinking. It was only after a couple of hours of this that conversation turned to Hara, and it was Ishikawa, not me, that brought him up.

"I know you are friendly with Mr. Hara. I think I should tell you. Be careful. Last year, in his locker, some teachers found photographs. Of children. Pornography. So most teachers stay away from him now."

I thanked him for the warning. "I'll be careful." I said. "Don't worry, I don't entirely trust Hara-sensei… He's too friendly…"

I have to confess that I didn't entirely trust the story about child pornography, either, though. Hara had, after all, "warned" me that the English teachers would disapprove of our relationship - almost as if he'd anticipated such a moment as this. I knew that someone was manipulating me, and I had a pretty good idea that there were bad feelings between Hara and a lot of the other teachers, but I had a hard time believing kiddie porn would be the issue. What I regard as kiddie porn is available at every convenience store in Japan; half the men's magazines have pictures of girls in schoolgirl outfits, or scantily-clad pictorials of fifteen year old girls slapped in-between the nudie spreads. It just didn't seem believable, that teachers would avoid Hara for such a reason. Afterwards, I regretted not pressing Ishikawa for details. Were the photos of students from our school? Were the students girls… or boys? All that the warning accomplished was to give me a reason to rationalize Hara's desperation for a friendship. If he really is a sort of pariah among the other teachers, no wonder he lays it on so thick with me. He's an exile in their midst. He must be lonely. I figured that maybe, even if he did have a sort of sick sexuality, I should stand by him. I couldn't help him by avoiding him, after all.

We would continue to get together every month or so, to visit Hara's home or to tour about shrines. He's a big shrine-goer. He wants to see every Shinto site in the prefecture, I think. One day, he said something that reminded me of Ishikawa's warning. "In past days, if a girl student was hurt, I could pick her up. I could carry her. Have girl student in my arms. Now, if I touch - DON'T TOUCH! Is dangerous, is sekuhara, sexual harassment. Is sad."

I voiced my opinion in favor of sexual harassment laws, eyeing him slightly suspiciously.

He changed the topic.

		Politics and the War

He began, when with me, to talk more and more about politics. He sensed my interest. I was slowly learning more and more about the situation here, piecing things together from what I saw and what I read. The Hino Maru, the Japanese flag, for example, never flies at school, and is only hauled out for certain ceremonies. Leftist teachers associate it with militarism, and are quite worried that both it and the anthem, "Kimi Ga Yo," have been made official in recent years. Some teachers refuse to honor either. One leftist teacher at the school explained to me that the people who don't honor the flag associate it with military expansionism, the push into Manchuria and China that preceded Japan's involvement in the Second World War; the people who defend the flag and the anthem - the right wingers - generally don't think that the Japanese were acting aggressively at this time. They were putting Asia in order, establishing hierarchy, doing what was necessary and right - fortifying the area against western expansionism, bringing her backward relatives in China and so forth into the 20th Century. They refused to accept that Japan did anything wrong… Hara, it started to seem, was somewhat of a right winger himself. He told me the names of the teachers at our school who thought "the flag meat war." Communists, he said. Dangerous. Don't they know, don't they understand what Communism has done to the world?

Hara thinks both the flag and the anthem are beautiful, and is sad that some of his coworkers disagree.

Hara thinks that it is sad - he explains this to me while he drives - that some of the other history teachers teach lies about the war, teach Korean and Chinese propaganda to the students. It hurts his stomach, he says, gesturing, grimacing. "Why? Why you teach these anti-Japanese lies?"

Hara thinks Iris Chang's book is propaganda.

When he first explains these things to me, I don't entirely catch on. I don't know about Chang, at that point. I've seen her book at a few of the English-language bookstores, and been amazed and impressed that ANYTHING about Nanjing is available here, regardless of the language… but I haven't made a note of the name of the author. I know a little bit about the Japanese war record - my dad, when he was young, knew townspeople who were nearly destroyed by their experiences in Japanese prisoner of war camps. I've read a little. I know Japanese deny any guilt. I know that a massacre happened at a place called Nanjing, or Nanking, in China, but I don't know the numbers or the reasons. I've taught Korean immigrants back home who have explained about "Comfort Women" and the refusal of the Japanese to admit culpability or pay reparations. I've seen a documentary on TV in which a guard who worked at a camp where several Australian POWs starved to death just blinked innocently at this fact, when confronted with it, and explained that everyone had enough food and was well-treated. I know these things, but I don't fully register what Hara has said.

Between that meeting and the next, I do some homework. I read Chang. I talk with a Chinese-Canadian friend. I want to know, when Hara next starts telling me his opinions, just how far he's going. What sort of man have I allowed myself to form a friendship with? I read Suzuki and Oiwa's The Japan We Never Knew, which has excellent descriptions of some of the political and social problems Japan has faced in recent years. Honda Katsuichi is interviewed therein. He's a Japanese journalist who did his own investigation into the rape of Nanjing, and wrote a book about it. "Twenty years after the war's end," Honda says, "most Japanese still do not know what the Japanese did in China… There is nothing to be gained from apologizing for past militarism. A true apology is to prevent the rise of militarism today." (hardcover edition, p. 38). He accuses some Japanese of "passing on (the crime of Nanjing) to our children's generation," by not being honest about it, and others of being "medaka fish" - little fish incapable of doing anything but swimming with their school, turning whichever way the rest of the fish turn, in one blind instinctive move (38-43). Honda has to wear a disguise in public now, afraid of reprisals from rightists.

Meanwhile, in between meetings with Hara, life goes on at school. I keep my eyes open; I'm curious about the politics of people around me, curious about the tensions beneath the surface at the teacher's room. At one ceremony, where "Kimi Ga Yo" is played, I see one of the union teachers make a point of sitting down for it. I, of course, stand, since for an outsider to sit would be far ruder; but I admire the fellow's bravery. On another occasion, a left-wing teacher organizes a viewing of a film about the burakumin, Japan's "untouchable" caste, called The River with No Bridge. It makes a case for ending discrimination against burakumin. Some of the other teachers protest playing this film, though they refuse to explain why… A couple of the older teachers tell me about their experiences in university in the 60s, where there were strikes and protests much like in North America. One of them talks about her background as a socialist. Her sister was a communist. A lot of teachers were… She tells me that recently books have been published that deny Japanese war crimes; she's afraid of the direction her country is moving.

I'm also curious about the right wing, though. I think there is something to be said for defending traditional Japanese culture against incursions from the west, think there are many good things going on here that only stand to be corrupted by westernization. I read Mishima's Runaway Horses and Nitobe's Bushido. I socialize with some of the more conservative teachers, and think they have good things to say, sometimes. They seem to be much more concerned for the discipline of the students than their education. This doesn't seem completely unreasonable.

Hara, on my next visit to his home, horrifies me.

He tells me over tea that at the most, 2000 people might have died at Nanjing - a hundred times less than the accepted minimum figure. He explains that there were only a few hundred thousand people in the city to begin with, and that the population was in fact larger after the alleged "massacre" than before - an argument one can also find on certain rightist websites. If rape happened, it wasn't methodical or systematic, but a regrettable casualty of war. Chang and her lot are propagandists who hate Japan, who are trying to corrupt trade relations with the United States, or to steal reparation money from the Japanese government. Newspapers report such stories only because they sell, not because they're true. The teachers who teach the children these lies, that 200 000 or more people were brutally killed and/or raped during the Japanese thrust into China, are deeply misled, confused, brainwashed by Communism into hating their own country. They should not be teaching their students these anti-Japanese lies.

As for prisoners of war, Hara explains - there is a famous story. An Australian prisoner was starving. A guard took pity on him, and gave him some gobo. Lotus root. The prisoner later complained, when the war was over, that he'd been fed something inedible, a root, wood, something that wasn't food - that the guard had been torturing him. The guard was executed for this, a martyr.

Hara offers this as a typical case, a story that proves that the Japanese were actually the misunderstood victims of WWII. Another teacher has told me this story on a previous occasion. They're the only mention any Japanese has made about the treatment of prisoners of war.

As for comfort women, Hara explains - they were simply prostitutes. They wanted it. They did it for the money, and now are coming forth to complain because they want more money.

Hara explains this all rather reasonably, trying to convey to me just how unfairly the rest of the world has dealt with Japan. He goes from issue to issue, without pause, demonstrating that he thinks of it all as being of a piece. "The lies people tell about my country," by Hara.

		Condemned to Repeat It

This time, I'm well-researched enough to feel very uncomfortable, listening to what Hara says. I need to respond, somehow. How? If I get visibly upset, go on the offensive, he'll just feel like he's being unfairly treated. If I argue with him, he'll have his own versions of the facts to play with. There's a passage in Orwell's 1984 that comes to mind at moments like these - "How can you argue with the lunatic who is more powerful than you, who listens politely to your well-reasoned arguments and then simply persists in his lunacy?" Something like that, anyhow. I realize that I'm not going to have a lot of luck persuading this fellow of anything.

I'm from Canada, from the Vancouver area. During the Second World War, Japanese Canadians were deprived of their rights and their property, shipped off to camps in the interior of the province where they couldn't spy or commit sabotage. Many of them were nisei or sansei; many of them had - or were! -- children. Guterson's Snow Falling On Cedars was made into a movie, recently, dealing with similar events in the United States; I'm more familiar with this bit of history through Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan. In the 1980s, protests from the Japanese Canadian community led to the government of Canada admitting wrongdoing and making reparations. Maybe I could argue with Hara in this way, demonstrate that many other countries have committed racist injustices (neverminding that Canada doesn't have quite as much blood on it's hands as Japan does) and have since admitted to them… I try to explain this. Hara sits, blinking and mild, across the table from me.

My hands, I notice, are shaking. I need to say something more.

I tell him that if the government hadn't apologized, that Japanese-Canadians would never feel safe in Canada again - would be aware of the constant threat that their rights might be taken away. That many Chinese and Koreans feel a similar mistrust toward Japan.

I mention the policy of genocide towards Native Americans through the past two centuries. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." That the price of joining together as a global community - if such is truly possible - is for people to be honest about what their countries have done, and to try to make amends, where they can. Bloodshed and brutality are perhaps inevitable where cultures clash, and it is perhaps understandable that Japan should have done such terrible things to its neighbors - most countries in the world have, at one point in their past. But if we're to enter a global age, there has to be some sort of… atonement… for these things. A coming clean, as the first step to a commitment that such things must not happen again.

Hara sits, a mild expression on his face. I can't tell whether he understands a word that I'm saying. I can't stop.

I tell him about Jim Keegstra, the Canadian teacher who taught his students that the Holocaust never happened. How holocaust revisionists are generally just Nazis, and are regarded, generally, with contempt by any educated people. How Canadian people don't believe that such men should be allowed to teach in our schools.

I tell him, rather pathetically, that if my Chinese Canadian friend were here right now, he'd be very, very angry with Hara.

I pick up the piece of paper he has been scribbling his figures (from 200000 to 2000 in a few short sentences!) and write on it two quotes, one from Santayana, the other from Joyce. I may have gotten the words slightly wrong. "Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it," and "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up."

Then I apologize and say that these are "difficult" issues to talk about. Chotto muzukashii, ne? Chotto abunai… And we change the subject.

I don't walk out, you see. I can't, don't know how to. Hara has been friendly and kind with me. I don't want to offend or hurt him. This seems wrong, somehow - weak. I was supposed to smite him down and leave, outraged. I was supposed to blind him with the truth, just as he has been blinded by lies. At the very least, I was supposed to make a good show of my indignation. Instead, I hung around as his kids came home and taught them, and Hara, a few popular western card games, in exchange for their teaching me some Japanese ones. We stuck with small talk for the rest of the night. Inwardly, I cursed myself for making so little of Ishikawa's warning.

Later, before Hara drove me to the train station, I allowed myself one last question. We'd gone for a walk to Hara's family shrine. I asked him if he thought that most Japanese still believed their Emperor to be divine.

He pretended he hadn't understood me, so I asked again.

He said, "Yes," in a defeated way. Just "Yes."

Eventually I went home. I sat up, thinking about history, flipping through Chang's melodramatic rendering of the massacre. Wondering what to do about Hara. I don't think I slept well that night.

		The Blowout

The next day, Hara showed up at my doorstep. It was a Saturday. I was getting ready to go out for my weekly Japanese lesson. I wasn't expecting anyone. No teacher had ever unexpectedly dropped by before. I'd been in Japan at least six or seven months by this point - long enough to know just how shy and circumspect the Japanese can be. Long enough to be shocked when the doorbell rang, and I opened the door, and saw who it was.

My first thought was of the people who have been shot in the back by rightist factions here, for saying things criticizing Japan during the war. Criticizing the Emperor. I felt this shiver of fear. What does this man want?

I invite him in.

"Uh… Hara-sensei. I'm rather surprised to see you…"

"Yes. I in neighborhood."

"Was there some reason you were dropping by?" (What the hell do you want?).

"No, no, is friendly only. Social visit."

"Uh, have a seat… How are you?"

"I okay. Ah, sorry -- " He notices my textbook, open on the floor. "You busy."

"I'm a little busy. I have a Japanese class to go to. I have a few minutes, if there's something you want to talk about." I figure maybe he is disturbed by our conversation of the other day, and needs to talk… It seems right, if so, that I hear him out.

He proceeds to tell me about a computer he's buying. He sits happily on my couch, chatting. I feel dizzy, confused. What the hell is this guy doing? How do I deal with him?

"Uh, excuse me, Hara-sensei," I say, cutting him off. "But is there something you want?"

I imagine I looked at him pretty directly as I said this.

He paused for a second, silent. Then stood up, moving in an exaggerated way, with a tragic samurai stiffness. A ceremonial offended-leave-taking kind of way.

"I have committed a rudeness," he said. "I go."

I walked him to the door, jabbering. "Sorry, no, it's just that I have work to do, I have to go soon, I wasn't prepared to see you, I'll talk to you at school." I closed the door behind him - Hara seeming sad, quiet. I waited a second, as he walked away, then locked it.

At school, I proceeded with Plan B: Avoid Hara at all costs. If I saw him coming from one direction, I would go another. Any time I had to navigate from the entrance to the teachers' room to my desk in the back corner, I would take the long route, so as not to pass near where he sat. I couldn't tune him out altogether. One day, he gave me a candy.

"Is friend's day," he explained. "We friends."

I gave him a candy back, and continued to avoid him. Maybe because I felt guilty about this, though - I began to notice that he spent very little time socializing with the other teachers. No one seemed to talk to him. He was silent and invisible most of the time, and when he was called upon to speak, did so in a quiet, formal, shy way. He seemed genuinely hurt by my rejection. He would still try to smile at me, but he got only the briefest of responses. He seemed to get sadder and sadder, and I felt worse and worse.

I had a conversation one day with my Chinese-Canadian buddy about him, a "what should I do" sort of talk. He said something that surprised me. "Can't you just be friends with the guy, despite what he believes?"

I didn't think I could.

I began to wonder about Ishikawa's story. Maybe it wasn't pornography at all that led to other teachers avoiding Hara. Maybe it was much more political than that.

		I, Marmot

April came and went. The time of "the Great Desk Shuffle." The teachers in the shokuin changed their seating arrangements, according to the grade they'd be mostly teaching in the upcoming year. I had expected we'd just carry our belongings to a different desk. Instead, every teacher pulled, pushed, or carried his desk, often with everything still in it, to a new location in the shokuin, while others swept up the dust bunnies that had accumulated underneath. I was offered the chance to move my desk, and seized it. I moved out of Siberia, and got to sit over in the ichi nensei section, by the door. This was either a token that I had been accepted as a fellow teacher, or a sign that they badly needed my previous deskspace to store a computer. Either way, it's been much harder to retreat into anonymity now. My corner hideout is a thing of the past. And Hara didn't go away. I tossed it over in my mind a hundred times. I didn't want to hurt his feelings. I wanted things to be reasonably friendly between us, as long as we were going to be seeing each other every day. It also seemed to me that if I did just avoid him, he wouldn't get anything out of it, would never understand just how disturbing his opinions about his country's past had been. I avoided him for two months or so, but eventually, I accepted an invite to go shrine-hopping with him again.

We avoided talking about the war.

Since our "blowout", we've gotten together a few times. I've visited his house once. I found out that his hometown was one of the few suburban areas in our prefecture to get bombed during the war. He still pounds me on the back and compliments my wide knowledge whenever I reveal that I know anything at all about any topic he regards as specialized. He's done the trick again of setting up a meeting with me and following my bike home, too. The last time he did this, he actually arrived a half an hour early at my apartment and waited for me to pedal around the corner, assumedly so I'd feel guilty and further obliged to him. Despite it all, I have to admit that part of me likes him, likes his kids, his wife. I feel flattered by the attention he's paid and amused by his goofy, gentle manner. He called himself a "marmot" on our last shrine-hop. He was lost, driving around the roads. "I marmot, I lost," said, doing a little rodent imitation.

This is not to say that everything's okay, however. Hara now is back to sticking far too close to me, coming up to me almost every day with one thing or another… A pothead buddy back home once told me that voudon (voodoo) practitioners have a trick where you write down a person's name, put it in a baggie with water, and freeze it - to keep them at a distance. But my little bar-fridge isn't big enough to house such superstitions.

I've only had one open conversation about Hara with a fellow teacher. He had worked at my school, then transferred out this April. I've stayed in touch with him. We went to a "Peace Museum" together last month and felt comfortable enough with each other to talk a bit about the war. There were some very interesting bits of propaganda on display. The stuff from the Sino-Japanese war at the end of the 19th Century was quite shockingly blatant. It showed images of masses of dirty peasants - Chinese - being executed or otherwise whipped into shape by huge, black-uniformed, noble-looking Japanese soldiers. Quite unlike the propaganda for the Russo-Japanese war or WWII, which are, in different ways, far more conscious that the "eyes of the world" are watching. One of the Sino-Japanese paintings really amazed me. It showed the soldiers, proud and tall, systematically cutting heads off Chinese peasants, kneeling in their rags. There was a bunch of bloody heads on a pile in the floor. What was amazing was that the artist was attempting to convey the rightness of the action, that the viewer was meant to look at the Japanese soldiers, or the headless Chinese corpses, and feel only the beauty and purity of the action. The justice. I went back to look at it a few times.

The Japanese teacher I was with joined me in looking at this and said, unhappily, "In this century too, things like this happened. Nanjing."

I was impressed.

Later that day, I told him about Hara, the things Hara had said. He laughed. "If Hara weren't a teacher, what he believes would be no problem. But he teaches history, to children. Facts are facts." He explained that no teacher would have all that much to do with Hara, because of his politics. I told him that I'd begun to be afraid, myself, that if I didn't disown Hara, if I allowed the relationship to continue, the other teachers might start to avoid ME, too.

		Time Goes By

I've taught in Japan for over a year now. Long enough to come to accept that I'm not going to be able to make any lasting reforms on the way English is taught here. Long enough to accept that my students, given the lack of a workable curriculum and a lack of interest - I won't say of ability - on the part of their teachers will never be able to really communicate in my language, unless they put exceptional effort in on their own time.

I've watched Daikoners flame and insult each other about their interpretations of war history.

I still don't know what to do with Hara. I don't care much, at the moment. I've got a year to get through, lessons to plan, bills to pay. Nothing has worked so far, and I guess I've stopped believing anything will. I'm trying to focus more on the kids. They're the important ones.

This strategy doesn't entirely work, though. Hara is teaching these same children that Japan did nothing wrong during World War II. Keeping them misinformed, perpetuating lies, ensuring, perhaps, that the bad blood between Japan and China - or Japan and the rest of the world - won't ever go away. "Passing on" guilt for war crimes.

He's not a bad man. He means well. He just wants to be able to love his country. Thing is, I'd like to be able to, as well.

The story isn't over yet. Just the written part.

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