A million images flashed around in my mind trying to resolve this odd situation that had been thrust on me in front of this class of teenage Japanese students. Different strands of thinking were floating around, my slow brain attempting to pin down what he must have meant when he said those words to me. I say slow brain, but all this happened in less than a couple of seconds in real time. If he meant what I think he meant then obviously he's utterly incorrect.
‘…we were allies in the war, right?’.
I didn't want to contradict him in front of his class, although half of them were probably not paying such close attention and the other half had no idea what was said because it was in English and said in passing in such a casual, throwaway fashion.
Surely he was not talking about the Second World War? He couldn’t be. He can’t be that totally wrong. That’s the big one though. If you are talking about ‘The War’, no doubt you are referencing this one, right? Whether it be from a British perspective or a Japanese one. And so if that were the case, he would be so wrong. My great grandfather would have something to say about this.1 My grandparents, who are still with us, wouldn’t and still won’t buy a Japanese car because of the atrocities during the war.2
My co-teacher made this statement so off the cuff that in a way it was not meant to invite a response from me and so I could have let it slide. Well, I didn’t. It seemed to me, in the little time that actually passed in the moment, that I ought to respond. But how?
- ask him to explain himself a bit more, which would have dragged this on unnecessarily. I mean, this is an English lesson for second year middle school kids about a not overly taxing (though you wouldn’t know it) grammar point.
- contradict his statement, telling him that in fact we were very much enemies in a horrific war, which surely would have been wasted energy - again, this was an offhand comment not relevant to anything in a class of disinterested and confused teenagers. Or…
- engage my worst people pleasing tendencies and try to find a way to make what he said acceptable and true, whether that be twisting what he meant so much that it’s about something else. And that is exactly what I did.
I don’t mean to brag but for once my brain came up with something usable in this scenario. A scenario in which I wasn’t expecting to be thrust into on this clear sunny day in this modern looking middle school surrounded by rice fields.
‘Oh yeah, in the First World War. That’s right’. Well done brain, you did it. I may have well not said anything though. We were quickly back to the lesson. I mean, it was an offhand comment I was responding to anyway. I suppose by replying I made sure I was agreeing to something I knew to be true rather than going along with something patently false.
I’ll never know if he did in fact mean the First World War with his statement. He knew very well that I was (and still am) British, not indeed German or Italian. Though 'The War' doesn't make me think of Kaiser Wilhelm and trenches, but rather a man with a shorter moustache with a nasty penchant for genocide. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt anyway (my co-teacher, not either of the aforementioned moustachioed men). I suppose I already did that with my reply at the time.3
1 I say this knowing next to nothing about the man. What I do know and learned only in my mid 20s, however, is that my great grandfather had been a prisoner of war and sent to the Japanese mainland for hard labour during ‘the war’. According to my grandad (my great grandfather’s son in law), he never talked about the experience except one time when he went to see David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, where he remarked to my grand-uncle that ‘they must have thought we were all having a big picnic…’↩
2 These grandparent being on the other side of my family than those previously mentioned.↩
3 Footnotes are fun. Maybe I’ll keep adding them to these articles I publish. Perhaps I’ll add so many that they’ll dwarf the content of the body of the article itself. Keep reading to see if that does indeed happen. Anyway, since this is the actual end of the article today I’ll say thank you for reading this. It is just one little thing that happened to me during my time living in Japan. There are many more, though this one stuck in my head more than most.↩
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