Japandamonium!!!

Yesterday at Kuwa Sho we had an emergency procedures drill, where a bell rang and the kids all duck-and-covered and then we screamed out of the building in lines by their teachers like paratroopers on the jump, assembled outside for an insanely long time while the principal talked very very slowly about, as far as I could tell, the dangers of smoking?, and then had to march through bays of running water before re-entering the building (because we wore our shoes outside). The drill was supposed to cover three kinds of emergencies: fires, earthquakes, and “crazy people coming into the school to take, kill, or attack with sticks the children and/or teachers.” Which was, I found out the hard way, no laughing matter. I mean, I thought it was momentarily, but, um, I was proven wrong. DOLPHIN! GO AWAY! DOLPHIN!!!!! Okay, he’s gone. Right, so apparently this happened in Osaka like three years ago; a crazy guy came into school and then something bad happened … I couldn’t really tell what, but something and it was bad. I think it involved sticks. I have to say, I don’t know what the hell good that drill would do against situation #3 up there. Like, you assemble the whole school and then the senseis have to fight the crazy guy off duel style to champion the kids? That would be aaaaawesome. This country rocks.

The best part of the fire drill was just after we washed our feet off to come inside; there on the ground in the doorway are towels to step on, thin and rectangular like long dishtowels. The one I’m standing on is off-white, and has a picture in pink of a woman’s shoes and the bottom few inches of her dress, cartoony-like and walking briskly across the terrycloth. Below her heels midstride it read:

“I would feel even more pretty, I think,
If only you would give me a few words of praise.”

Amazing.