New for 1999: I figured out tables, and the dates now have the Japanese year in them too. H11 means Heisei 11, the eleventh year of the current Emperor's era, which is how the forms at the Board of Ed count. 1999 is Heisei 11. I feel very local.

Sunday, June 20, 1999 (H11.6.20)

Rainy season. Tsuyu. It has been raining, or about to rain, or just finished raining, since the second week of June. Everything is damp. The futon is damp. The tatami smells like a basket. My towels don't dry, they just give up.

Rachel's binder, Tab 11: MOLD. "Open the closets every sunny day. There will be no sunny days. Open them anyway." I have been at war with a gray bloom on the back wall of the closet for ten days, with a spray bottle of bleach and a rag, and I'm losing. My tidy apartment. My beautiful tidy apartment.

But. The rice went in last month, and now the paddies are full of water and they're mirrors, every one of them with a piece of sky in it, and at night the frogs sing like the whole valley is one big engine. Along the temple wall the hydrangeas are out, blue and purple. Mrs. Fukuda's are pink. Nakagawa-sensei says that's the soil, not the flower, that the same bush will be blue in acid soil and pink in the other kind. Of course he knows that.

In five weeks it'll be a year. The prefecture's asked me to help with the new JETs at their orientation in August. I'm the old one now. When did that happen.

Thursday, April 22, 1999 (H11.4.22)

The shooting at the high school in Colorado has been on the news here every night. The teachers ask me what I think about it and I don't know what to say in either language. My own high school in Albuquerque looked like that one on TV. The same windows. The same kind of cafeteria.

Today a third-year boy stayed after class and asked me in English, very carefully, like he'd been practicing it: "Teacher. Is America dangerous?" I said, "Some places. Sometimes." I didn't know what else was true.

Nakagawa-sensei didn't ask me anything. He put a can of hot tea from the machine on my desk and went back to his grading.

Friday, April 9, 1999 (H11.4.9)

The Japanese school year starts in April, so on Wednesday it all began again: the entrance ceremony for the new first-years. They're twelve. Their uniforms are brand new and two sizes too big, because their mothers buy them to grow into, so the sleeves come down past their fingertips and the boys look like little black tents with heads. They are so small. Last September the third-years seemed like grown-ups to me, and these kids look like they should be holding somebody's hand to cross the street.

I did my self-introduction again. Nobody yelled "Mekishiko" this time. I understood maybe sixty percent of the principal's speech, up from zero last fall.

Here is the thing I want to write down. A new teacher, transferred in from the coast, came up to my desk on his first day and asked me where the copy paper is kept. And I told him. In Japanese. And he said thank you and went and got it. I'm not new anymore. I know where the copy paper is.

Saturday, April 3, 1999 (H11.4.3)

The cherry trees along the river came out all at once, on Tuesday, like somebody flipped a switch. Today was the teachers' hanami, the flower-viewing party: blue plastic tarps under the trees, shoes off at the edge of the tarp as if it's a house, lunch boxes, beer, sake, and me with my bottle of oolong tea. The P.E. teacher has made "Molly-sensei, oolong-cha de kanpai!" into his catchphrase. Petals fell into everybody's cups. It was freezing. Hanami is always freezing, I'm told, and everyone sits there in their coats pretending it's spring because it's on the calendar.

Nakagawa-sensei explained, with a chopstick and a paper napkin, that nearly all these trees are one kind, Somei-yoshino, and that every one of them was grown from a cutting, not a seed, so they're all basically the same tree. That's why they bloom on the same day, up and down the whole river. One tree, a thousand times. I thought that was the most beautiful thing I'd heard all week. Then I thought, he's the only person here who explains things to me like I'm smart instead of like I'm foreign. Then I drank my tea.

Wednesday, March 24, 1999 (H11.3.24)

Public school teachers here get transferred every few years by the prefecture, to a different school, sometimes hours away, and nobody knows who's going where until the end of March, when the list comes out in the newspaper. Everyone reads it like election results.

The vice principal is going to a school on the coast. I'll miss him. I will actually miss his coffee-can ashtray. He taught me the word for cigarette by offering me one every single morning for seven months. Two other teachers are going too, and there will be a farewell ceremony and speeches and crying.

Oda-sensei stays. Nakagawa-sensei stays.

How I found out: at seven this morning Mrs. Fukuda knocked with a daikon radish under one arm and the newspaper under the other, open to the list, with his name circled in pen. She pointed at it. She patted my arm. She went home.

I have never said one word to Mrs. Fukuda about Nakagawa-sensei. Not one. This town knows everything.

Monday, March 15, 1999 (H11.3.15)

White Day report: the men of the teachers' room returned the Valentine chocolate as a group, one very large tin of cookies for all the women. Also on my desk: one small bag of white chocolate, and a diagram of the solar system, neatly drawn, with a tiny arrow pointing at the third planet that said, in English, "You are here. (Japan.)"

I have no idea what that means. I've been thinking about what it means all day.

Sunday, March 14, 1999 (H11.3.14)

The third-years graduated on Friday.

The gym was hung with red and white striped curtains, which is what they use here for anything important. Parents in black suits, a few mothers in kimono. The principal handed each student a diploma with both hands and each student took it with both hands and bowed and turned and walked the exact route they'd rehearsed every afternoon for two weeks, to the inch. Then they sang. Then everybody cried, the students, the teachers, the tough P.E. teacher, the parents, me. I cried the most. I've known them for six months.

The boys wear black jackets with high collars and a row of brass buttons, and there's a tradition: a girl asks the boy she likes for the second button from the top, because it's the one closest to his heart. After the ceremony there were boys walking around with no buttons at all, boys with all their buttons, and one boy with only the second one missing, looking extremely pleased with himself. You could read the whole school's love life off the jackets.

A girl named Saori, who never said one word in my class without looking at the floor first, gave me a letter in an envelope with a rabbit sticker. "Dear Molly teacher. Thank you for your class. You are always smile. I was shy but you said my English is good. I will go to high school and study English more. Please don't forget me."

I won't, Saori.

Saturday, February 13, 1999 (H11.2.13)

In Japan, Valentine's Day is when the women give chocolate to the men. All the men. At the office. It's called giri-choco, obligation chocolate. Oda-sensei told me very kindly that as a foreigner I didn't have to, but the women teachers go in together on a box for every man in the teachers' room, and I wanted to be a woman teacher and not a foreigner for once, so I put in 500 yen. Fourteen men, fourteen little boxes. Valentine's is Sunday, so we handed them out yesterday. The men received them with enormous ceremony, as if it had never happened before. On March 14th, White Day, they're supposed to give something back.

And. Fine. I bought one more box, from me alone, and left it on Nakagawa-sensei's desk under a worksheet on which I had drawn a heart. An anatomical heart. The real kind, with the chambers labeled in katakana. It's a science joke. It's a joke. Oda-sensei watched me do it and said nothing and smiled at her grading for an hour.

Also, this morning's news: back home, the Senate voted not to remove the President. The P.E. teacher wanted to discuss it with me, at length, in Japanese, at the copy machine. I said "Muzukashii desu ne," it's complicated, isn't it, which is the most useful sentence in the language.

Wednesday, February 3, 1999 (H11.2.3)

Today was Setsubun, the day before the first day of spring on the old calendar. (It snowed four inches. Spring.) Mrs. Fukuda came over at dusk with a paper bag of roasted soybeans and a cardboard demon mask. You open your front door and throw beans out into the dark and shout "Oni wa soto!", demons out! Then you throw them into your own house, "Fuku wa uchi!", luck in! Then you eat one bean for every year of your age, and Mrs. Fukuda says one more for luck. I ate twenty-six. She ate hers in a handful, not counting, and laughed at me for counting. I'll be finding soybeans in the tatami till April.

And this afternoon I turned in the form. I checked Yes. I'm staying a second year.

Kimura-san stamped it with his little red name stamp and said "Yokatta," I'm glad, and then, very formally, in English, "Thank you for your decision," and bowed, and I bowed, and then he wiped his neck with the towel even though it's February.

I called home. Mom cried and said she was proud. Sean said, "So can I keep your stereo." Dad got on last and said, "Molly, you sound like yourself on the phone now." I don't know exactly what he meant. I've been thinking about it all night, under the kotatsu, with the soybeans.

Thursday, January 21, 1999 (H11.1.21)

The re-contracting form came today. JETs sign on for a year at a time and can stay up to three. It's due back at the Board of Ed by February 5th. It has two boxes on it.

Reasons to go home: The cold. Being a curiosity every minute I'm outside my apartment. Not being able to read my own mail. Grandma is eighty-six. Everyone I went to college with is starting real lives, grad school, jobs with dental, engagements. I am twenty-five and I sleep under a table.

Reasons to stay: Mrs. Fukuda. The first-year boy who said "I like you, teacher!" in the hallway and ran away so fast he hit a door. The eleven kids at the mountain school, where I go on Thursdays and eat lunch with all of them at one long table. That I can read the word for "exit" now, and "danger," and "women." That I'm finally not terrible at this. The quiet. The quiet is a reason on both lists.

There's one more reason and I'm not putting it on the list.

Sunday, January 3, 1999 (H11.1.3)

Home from the Endos'. New Year's, the rest of it:

The bell. I rang it. You swing a log on a rope into a huge bronze bell and the sound goes right through the middle of your chest and out your back. It was five below zero, Celsius, and the stars were out for the first time in weeks. Yui held my coat sleeve all the way up and all the way back.

New Year's morning. The osechi boxes, finally, and ozoni, soup with mochi in it. Mochi is rice pounded until it turns into the stickiest substance known to science. Grandma Endo watched me eat mine very, very closely. Kenta explained later that every New Year's some old people choke on mochi and it's on the news, and she wasn't sure foreigners had the training.

The shrine. The first shrine visit of the year, to the little shrine above the rice fields, with a fire going in an oil drum and everyone in the whole town standing in line in the cold. Mrs. Endo asked if I wanted amazake, a hot sweet rice drink, then stopped herself and said some kinds have a tiny bit of alcohol, and bought me a can of hot cocoa from the machine instead. I have never told her I don't drink. The town knows everything. I drew a fortune slip: kichi, good luck. Yui got daikichi, great luck, and gloated. Kenta got kyo, bad luck, and tied it to the rack at the shrine so the bad luck would stay there and not follow him home.

The mail. New Year's Day the postman brings everybody's New Year's cards all at once, in a rubber-banded stack. I got sixty-one. From students, from teachers, from Kimura-san, from Mrs. Fukuda. It's the Year of the Rabbit, so: sixty-one rabbits. Rabbits drawn in pencil, rabbits in glitter pen, rabbits with speech bubbles saying HAPPY NEW YEAR MOLLY. Mrs. Fukuda's is a rabbit in brush and ink, three strokes, perfect. Nakagawa-sensei's is a rabbit in a lab coat. I did not know you were supposed to send them. I sent none. I am writing sixty-one this week, late, in shame.

The envelope. On the last night Grandma Endo gave me a little decorated envelope, the kind they give the children at New Year's, with a thousand-yen note in it. "For the child of the house," Mr. Endo translated. I said thank you and went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub for a while.