We all have our reasons

This week the kids are still on spring vacation, which means that all the teachers and office people still have to go to school and spend hours staring at their desks or running the club and team practices that the kids are required to go to throughout vacation, which the teachers are required to hold. Ever see the movie Brazil? Anyway, it means for me that I’m working at the office I spent last summer vacation in, with all the same old faces – my boss Kacho san, my surrogate mother Taeko san, and my handler, friend and life planner Mami chan. The difference is that the office itself has changed locations; from up in the lush Greenpier building—majestic on its hill above the town and fit with all the modern conviniences, like heating and insulation and hot-and-cold running water in the sinks—now we’ve been demoted to down in the town office building with the rest of the city personel. The shi-sho, or Town Office, evokes a building from a still-in-use mental hospital from like a hundred and fifty years ago, the kind you still see when you go driving around the sticks in the Berkshires in New York or Massachusettes. The entire place is built out of what seems to be a single, massive pour of concrete with a couple large meatpacking rooms where most of the town clerks work, and some smaller offices where the rest of us work. The plus side of this, and the only one that I can see, is that on Monday when Kacho san said to me, “well, this place sure is a heck of a lot smaller,” I got to tell him in perfect Japanese, “yep, that’s why I shaved my beard.”