The end has finally come. My one year on JET is all but done, and last Friday I formally said farewell to my little school.
I wrote a speech that I thought was splendiferous. I translated "all good things must come to an end" into Japanese and told the kids that my own dream at their age had been to come to Japan, so they could reach out and go for their dreams too. I also mentioned in passing that it was harder than I had expected to say goodbye to a bunch of rambunctious junior high kids.
At the time, it was a lie. A pleasantry. Japanese public speaking is nothing but lies and pleasantry, so I was doing my part to fit in.
But as the day wore on, it came to be true. Girls came into the teacher's room bawling their eyes out, crying things to the effect of "I can't believe he's leaving!" One of my poorest students, yet most enthusiastic, stuck by my side at every available opportunity. Then the letters started coming. A couple students came by to give me goodbye letters, and I had happened to write a letter to one of them, because she was one of The Special Ones.
The cat was out of the bag, so now the rest of the Special Letters had to get passed out. I had written letters to my 6 best students - not necessarily grade-wise, though they were all excellent students - but to the 6 who had really gone to the effort to communicate, to befriend me, to teach me as much as I had taught them. I told them just how talented they were and implored them to keep up their English with the ultimate end of getting out of Kawamoto. "The world is a wonderful place," I told all of them, "and America would love to meet you!"
Thereafter, the letters started to pour in. One student would be seen giving me a letter and the rest scrambled to write quick notes on their cute stationery notepads saying 'thanks' and 'come visit us!' But a few had gone to some extra effort. Of the Special Six, three were boys, so they didn't write anything. But of the remaining three, two had prepared small gifts for me in advance. One was a simple 'Thank You' done in traditional calligraphy style, and another was a note accompanied by a little Beijing 2008 Olympics mascot keyring - very cute, considering the student was ethnically Chinese.
None of the boys wrote me letters, save the lone special ed student. But I received many hugs and repeated "Dont go!" cries from the boys of my best class. I was honestly pretty floored by the love and support I was receiving. I had tried to be a teacher by personality for the last year, a role model in the same sense that my older brother was for me when I was a munchkin.
On the last day, I learned that it had worked.
Lunchtime came, and I had gotten an ego boost, but the "it's hard to say goodbye to kids" line was still a lie. Lunchtime went, and it had come time to really consider saying my last sayonara for good and getting out of school. After I left, Japanese formality would dictate that I was not to come back to the school again. Delaying it, I went on one last run around the school, checking into band practice, volleyball practice, baseball practice.
It did get really hard to say goodbye right at the end. It hit me that I
did have an impact here and I nearly became overwhelmed by the guilt of leaving these kids behind after just one year of having that impact. But it was the hardest when I hit the band practice room.
Rika [name changed], my absolute best student, the best of the Special Six, was in the band room, but she wasn't tuning up. She sat on the floor in a corner, her elbows propped on her knees, her face covered in her towel. While other girls had bawled all morning, she had been strong and kept her wits. But the ultimate moment of sayonara, that was too much for her to handle. She was clearly crying underneath her towel, and she was doing her absolute best to hide it.
As I left the room, I managed to stare at her intently enough to get her attention. The towel came down, revealing a tear-filled face, and I mouthed a 'sayonara' across the room directly at her as the very last thing I did before stepping out.
And that was when it became incredibly hard for me to say goodbye. The amount of power one wields as a teacher really can be unbelievable at times. I could tell I had a good effect on little Rika, especially embracing her interest in English, but the one thing that brought me to tears all day was her tears. That I could cause that much pain was something I hadn't expected even on my most self-confident of days.
From there, it was all downhill. When it came time to shake teachers' hands and say 'sayonara' to them, I really did get clouded up by the tears. It wasn't like any other time I had teared up before in my life. It was somehow less... voluntary.
The end came and went before I even knew it. It was an end that I had looked forward to for at least 6 months. And my last two weeks of work had been a nightmare of Japanese passive-aggression and boredom. But seeing my own departure through my kids' eyes, I thought (and still think)
how could I have looked forward to this?I know that I have a lot to look forward to - I have fun travels ahead, followed by the promise of taking a great risk at an incredible job, not to mention rejoining the civilized world and eating Mexican food. I can only hope that one (or more) of my kids follows suit, because the matter is now unfortuately out of my hands.
