Sensei

Before Alexandra had been assigned to teach there, she hadn't known where Fukuoka was. Between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was how it had been described to her by her predecessor and by people who had been to Japan, and before she went there, Alexandra described it that way, too. When she found it on the map, she added, "It's on Kyushu, the southernmost island," imagining a year-round tropical climate, a place where cherry blossoms could appear in midwinter, and where the lack of central heating in most apartments would not be cause for concern.

But Kyushu was not the southernmost island. Five hundred miles south of Kyushu was Okinawa, and two hundred miles south of Okinawa were the Sakishima Islands, and still south of those, the uninhabited islets of Okinotorishima, which were geographically the southernmost islands but politically under the jurisdiction of Tokyo Prefecture, one thousand miles north. Alexandra was an Assistant Language Teacher at a high school in Fukuoka, and she had been asked to help coach the debate team. Accuracy was imperative.

The students called her Arekusu, as she'd asked them to, or Miss Arekusu. Administrators and teachers called her Arekusu-san. On official documents, she was ALT Alexandra. Iguchi-sensei, an English teacher who had studied in Australia for a few years and who was her supervisor, introduced her in the staff room as Alexandra-sensei, even though she was only an assistant with no teaching credentials.

Moriyaki-sensei and Okada-sensei, the two other English teachers, were known by their colleagues as the English Queens and by students as the English Dragons. Okada-sensei, who was teaching English to the third-year students that year, stood with her chest out, inches away from Alexandra, and called her Areksu! And Moriyaki-sensei, who taught the second-year students, phrased her sentences to avoid calling Alexandra anything at all.

Moriyaki-sensei looked to be around the age of her students' parents and had no children of her own. She tinted her hair magenta and had a small, severe mouth, also magenta and lined with creases. She was the only teacher who wore high heels indoors rather than the standard school slippers, and while she was smaller than the other teachers and most of the students, she had a commanding presence. As she walked to class with Alexandra on her first day, a group of boys in the hall quieted and flattened themselves against the wall. "Ohayo-gozaimasu!" they shouted, and Moriyaki-sensei, lips pursed, acknowledged them with a nod.

The teachers stayed with the same students throughout the three years of high school, moving up a grade each April as the students did. Alexandra taught with all three English teachers. She had prepared a standard self-introduction lesson that she used for her first class meetings in September. She put on a Detroit Pistons Championship T-shirt and showed photographs of her family. She pointed out Michigan on a map of the United States: between Ohio and Canada, shaped like a hand, cold in the winter like Hokkaido (she had never been to Hokkaido), lots of snow. "Sugoi!" the girls said. She showed pictures of the Great Lakes and of Michigan's lighthouses. She pinned up a map with illustrations of the state's symbols: the robin, the Petoskey stone, the apple blossom. Across the bottom was the state motto: "If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you."

As she talked about herself and where she came from, she felt she was presenting facts about someone else, someone who liked basketball, winter, and lakes, someone who missed home. At a goodbye party before she left for Japan, her grandparents, who lived on the pleasant peninsula, had said, "Japan—why would you go there?"

The self-introduction lesson never took as long as Alexandra hoped it would. She spoke quickly, made nervous by students' blank faces. Iguchi-sensei apologized for his students' silence. "Eh, sumimasen, Alexandra-sensei. They are very interested, but their level of English is low." Sumimasen, meaning both "excuse me" and "I'm sorry," was a good word to use when one didn't know...