I am embarrassed to admit it, but it took me twenty three years before I learned how to write the number 5.
I blame my public school education.
My fives looked like fives alright. But, you can imagine how shocked and appalled I was to learn at the age of twenty three that my fives were not fives at all. Yet this condition had persisted from elementary school through university. The most embarrassing part is that it took an eight year old to correct me.
I had just recently started teaching English in elementary schools and I thought I had finally gotten a handle on teaching children and the basic cultural differences between Japan and America. The lesson was supposed to be a simple one- I had already taught basic numbers and we had moved on into learning how to tell time. Their regular teacher was supposed to have brought a clock for me to use, which of course had been forgotten. So, I improvised by writing times on the white board. When I first wrote that ill-begotten five, I knew something was wrong. A murmur raced across the thirty-odd fourth graders. Their teacher, never the friendliest or the most helpful of people looked on disapprovingly. Not realizing the problem, I moved on with the lesson even though this unusual reaction to a simple number had me slightly unnerved.
You see that what I was writing indeed resembled a normal five for all intents and purposes, I had not written it in the correct manner. This of course, made all my efforts simply futile. The Japanese used a writing system based on Chinese characters. Since the Japanese use roughly two thousand of these characters in their day-to-day life, one can imagine that it is quite a feat to memorize enough to be functionally literate. In order to help memorize these characters and have the average person produce something legible, each stroke of a character must be written in a very specific order. In the broad strokes (pun intended) the order is top to bottom, left to right.
Since this is the proper way to write kanji (the aforementioned Chinese characters) it is also applied when writing the Latin Alphabet. In Japan, students are taught to write the down stroke and curve of their five first. Then lift their pen and draw the horizontal bar, starting from the vertical bit, and going out. I draw my fives in one stroke, like an “s”. Thus the battle lines were drawn.
After the class finished, as the students returned to their class their teacher informed me of the grievous error I had committed. Diplomacy not being one of my strong skills, I told her as politely as I could given our mutual language barrier, to piss off. (Did you think Selfrighteousjerk is a title I gave myself?)
Obviously this wasn’t acceptable.
On my next break I returned to the teachers office, unaware of the ambush that awaited me. As I entered the room, I noticed the vice-principal waiting by my desk. A very forceful woman, even under the friendliest of circumstances she made it clear, to the best of her ability, that my fives were absolutely one hundred percent unacceptable. I made it clear, to the best of my ability that I did not care.
Was there a problem with my penmanship? No. Did my fives not look like proper fives? No. I failed to grasp what the problem was, and therefore I refused to accommodate their wishes just to fit in.
The vice-principal, on the other hand, persisted in her position that my fives were not real fives at all.
After a few minutes of insisting us insisting that the other was wrong, the argument began to get quite heated and soon, the vice-principal stormed off in frustration, while I sat down to enjoy a victory coffee.
My sense of triumph, and my victory coffee was cut short by a summons to the principals office. As I changed my regular slippers for principal`s office slippers, I prepared myself for round two. (In Japan, they don’t wear their shoes inside of school buildings, either.)
The principal of the school was an older man nearing retirement, and the first level headed person to be involved in the situation. He explained, to the best of his ability that it was important for the students to have consistency from every teacher. Still not understanding his point, I relented.
But now I think I do.
Western culture has firm roots on Greek philosophy, where Japan is not. In America we believe that what something looks like, and what it is does not have to be the same thing. If, for example, a hiker in the states was to wear a full suit of brand new alpine gear, he could expect to receive a few giggles in his direction. After all, if he was a real hiker, he wouldnt need to try so hard, right? In Japan this just isn’t the case. Everyone wears a uniform, all the time. Students wear their school uniforms, salarymen wear their identical suits with identical haircuts. Thuggish Yankii (from the word Yankee) wear track suits and housewives wear their aprons. Even Yakuza (mobsters) maintain an easily spotted dress code and haircut.
With very few exceptions, everyone wears the uniform of the group they identify with. The idea of a “poser” simply isn’t something that is given too much thought.
Of course, following this episode, only one thing changed. Having no other option and refusing to submit, I resorted passive-aggressive tactics and began to prepare my board before class where I could write my fatally flawed number five without harassment.
Repatriate 