The Men in My Country

5

meet the second man through Ken’ichi, a ninth-grade student at Meizen Junior High. Ken’ichi won the school’s, then the city’s annual English speech contest in the fall and now, in January, he is going on to compete at the next level in Nagano-ken. Miss Kita and I take the train from Matsumoto to Nagano City where we sit in a cold high school auditorium, listening to one speech after another, waiting for our student, Ken’ichi’s turn. We have worked with him for weeks leading up to this event, helped him practice his “r’s” —notoriously difficult for Japanese tongues —and urged him to show a little enthusiasm when he speaks. But maybe keep your hands still? I suggest. The trick at these speech contests is to achieve balance, to avoid looking stiff but by the same token, to avoid looking overly needy, like a theatrical freak. At Meizen the classrooms look all alike. Old hardwood floors. Beat-up desks, six across, six deep. Potted flowers near a sink. And a blackboard that students, including Ken’ichi, wash twice a day during our ritual cleaning shifts. Outside is a garden filled with snow all winter and flowers all spring. What are these? I asked my colleagues once, the Japanese English teachers who want me to help them practice their speaking skills. I pointed to a dark red flower in Meizen’s garden that I had never seen anywhere in the United States. It looked like a more vivid version of an Indian paintbrush. Muzukashii, muzukashii, the teachers said. Translations are difficult. They shuffled around in their dictionaries, opened up the pages of gardening books but no one knew, no one could say. I looked at the flowers just beginning to blossom that spring and wondered if it is the I ................................................................................ 17 naming of something that makes it real or the mystery of not knowing that makes it memorable instead. The contest continues and the contestants continue, one by one, when finally it’s Ken’ichi’s turn, Ken’ichi who is bouncing happily onto the stage. But before he opens his mouth, Miss Kita and I can tell he’s doomed. He looks frightened —like a cat I knew who loomed large in its house, overshadowing its owner in every important way but outside was vulnerable, a small jewel on the doorstep, shrinking against a darkening orange sky. I want to judges thank, Ken’ichi begins, for listening me to in some for advance . I am today pleasing this speech to give. My chest constricts. He is not reading the words on the page, the ones Miss Kita and I spent weeks helping him smooth out and organize . He is trying to speak from the heart. But the heart is riddled with error upon error. The heart makes no grammatical sense. The heart has only flashes of linguistic flair. Ken’ichi will not take home a ribbon for first or second or even third. He will not place. Of that I am sure. I am already composing the speech I will give to him Monday morning when, sad-faced, he returns to school. But for now I am trying to smile supportively and pretend that I hear nothing wrong since Ken’ichi, hands flying about his face unnaturally, seems to be looking directly at me. And so, he continues, refusing to look down at his carefully constructed notes, forgetting everything he practiced toward, Begin let me. To speech about Japan most valuable issue: littering. After the speeches, while the judges tally their scores behind closed doors, the rest of us move to the teachers’ room for cookies and tea. Anyway, Miss Kita says, excusing herself, I must go to bathroom now. And I realize I have been a terrible colleague to her, rarely if ever correcting her mistakes and imprinting her with my own inarticulate ways. I say “anyway,” for instance, to change subjects sometimes and now I have become aware that Miss Kita has started doing the same. The idea of correcting someone else’s mistakes, which I’m told is a part of my job as assistant English teacher, makes me shudder, partly because there is so much about English I don’t know. Split infinitives and past perfect and participles and gerunds—these parts of formal 18 grammar remain a foreign language to me...