Today I took some time to go back to Futami to visit Ito Yokado. Since I had the day free, I bought some tortillas at IY, and then on my way back home stopped in at Akashi Nishi high school.
Akashi Nishi high school was just up the street from where I was living in Futami, and my upstairs neighbors were working there as ALTs. I was always a little bummed that I had to take a train all the way to Takasago to go to work while my neighbors could sleep in and walk a few minutes to work. On top of that, Akashi Nishi is designated by the prefectural government as a “Super English School” – an experimental school that has three times the English teaching resources as other schools (as well as three ALTs) as an experiment to see what the student English proficiency level is compared to “normal” schools.
Anyway, the reason I dropped in was because I had heard that my ex-vice principal was now the principal of Akashi Nishi high school. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years, so I thought I’d pay him a visit.
The role of public high school principals is interesting – they have a very low workload, and a very high level of responsibility. Ultimately if anything happens at the school, good or bad, they are on the hook. The job is very ceremonial – they have a private office (very rare in Japan), they make speeches to the students a couple of times a month, and they meet and greet guests to the school. They don’t have to teach any classes, and they have very little paperwork. In fact, many of the principals I have known are pretty lonely sitting in that private office all day.
As I said before, Tona sensei was the vice principal at Takasago Minami while I was there. He’s a really nice guy, he helped me all the time with my Japanese, we spoke in English quite a bit, and he even came to our wedding (I broke protocol and invited him instead of my principal).
I was surprised to see that one of the office workers that I knew at Takasago was working in the office at Akashi Nishi, and so I was able to explain why I was there to her much quicker than if it had been a total stranger. The rest of the office was giving me looks (it is not often that a strange foreigner comes walking off the street and asks for the principal), but soon Tona sensei came out of his office and greeted me warmly, and we retired to his office for some tea and conversation.
We caught up on what we’ve been doing – he wanted to hear all about my job and my studies, and he told me about his new post at Akashi Nishi (it doesn’t pay that well), a trip this summer to Australia (he has to make a speech in English), and how his son is working for Osaka prefecture as a supervisor of transportation.
One thing about shooting the breeze with the principal of the school is that you don’t really have to worry about anybody else breaking into the conversation – he’s the boss and the school was at our disposal. I asked if Kimura sensei still worked there, and he got on the phone and ordered (!) him to the office so we could chat. I asked how his three ALTs were and he called somebody and had them brought to the office to meet me. It’s good to be friends with the boss.
We talked for about half an hour and then I begged off – I felt bad for taking up everyone’s time – but he encouraged me to come back anytime. I’ll take him up on the offer – it was nice to be back in that environment for a while.
In a weird coincidence I bumped into the Denya master on his scooter going to work, and so he stopped and we chatted for a little while. I’m hoping to visit the yakitori on Saturday the 5th with Haven and Kerry and introduce them to a real yakitori experience – he was happy to hear that. I sure wish I lived closer to Denya so that I could visit more often.
My last stop on the trip was at MaxValue. I brought the tortillas that I had bought from Ito Yokado and requested that they stock them in the store. I told them I would be a steady customer, so hopefully they’ll be able to bring them in. The manager didn’t sound too optimistic, though.
