Completing the Nod to Bukatsu

So I've returned to answer the question, "Why do I think Bukatsu is such a cool thing?" Well, before I answer that question, I've got to revise some of the misleading impressions I may have given with my previous post. The Way of the Middle Schooler, I translated Bukatsudo, likening it to the complicated, seemingly unbreakable set of rules governing the lives and honor of samurai. No doubt Bushido, the path followed by the samurai, was stringent, demanding physically and mentally, and utterly uncompromising in its delineations of what a samurai must do and how hard he must do it. What about Bukatsudou, however? Initially, I approached Bukatsudo as the modern manifestation of Bushido, only as applied to Hello-Kitty-loving, cell-phone-toting, pokemon-watching 13 year-old children as opposed to man-slaughtering, self-sacrificing, ultra-dedicated vassals of old-world warlords. I figured the Way of the Middle Schooler and the Way of the Samurai, while obviously divergent in many critical modes of application, were at least resonant ideologically. If, in the event of defeat, a samurai must take his own life to ease the sublime shame of failing his master, I figured that the Middle Schooler, while strongly discouraged from killing him or herself after a poor showing on the hurdles, for example, is at least obligated to go　精一杯, full-spiritedly, at practice so that a poor showing at the 大会 becomes less likely.

That's certainly how it goes at baseball practice. Maybe it was because my first brush with The Way of the Middle Schooler was with the most overly serious of them that I assumed it would be that way across the board, in fact it most certainly was, but at any rate after a few weeks of baseball practice I figured Japanese Middle Schoolers had the sort of work ethic to shame a navy seal. The first time I wandered up to a baseball practice, anxiously stepping through the gate in the chain-link fence after about three minutes trying to figure out how to open it up, I heard a hoarse voice call out from across the field and all sound ceased (that was Shuhei, he's the baseball captain and recently he was told by a doctor to stay quiet at practice for a few days because he had yelled his throat raw). Startled I looked up to find the entire team looking at me. Moments later, Shuhei yelled out again, Rei, Rei, Rei, and as one they bowed to me three times in quick succession. I was pretty confused by this. Awkwardly giggling I stumbled over to the bench, trying to ignore the way the kids doffed their hats and bowed to me whenever I passed them.

Then I got a real shock. The kids went back to practice, and what they did was run bunting drills for about an hour and then do an around the horn drill where they had to, well, throw the ball around the horn like fifty times without messing up. If a kid made a bad throw, or another dropped a good throw, both guilty parties would bow and apologize to the rest of the team before everyone started all over again. The most impressive thing? There was no coach to be seen. Nowhere. I could imagine American Middle Schoolers running bunt drills on their own, for an hour, without the barest whisper of a coach for miles, but it would take a few generous hits of payote. This Bukatsudo shit is fucking serious.

But that was just the baseball team. Those guys actually are little modern samurai. My mistake was thinking every group was like them. My misconceptions were corrected when I met the track team. And the ping-pong team. And the computer team. Don't get me wrong, there are serious teams out there that don't whack around balls with sticks; the volleyball team, at least the girls, take their shit pretty seriously, and I imagine it's probably not a good idea to fuck around with the kendo club, considering your coach wears armor and carries around a heavy stick, but EVERY kid isn't like that. The track team, which I have been a consistent 'member' of for the past few weeks, proved to me that in Japan the Way of the Middle Schooler isn't necessarily paved with stones of dedication and back-breaking commitment. No, goofing around and dicking off are prevalent here as well. The other day my buddy Shunsuke had to run in normal shoes because he had somehow managed to throw his spikes on top of a storage shed. I was asked in between sets of sprints by a group of girls if I would rather eat poop-flavored curry or curry-flavored poop. I thought about it for a minute and eventually came to the only conclusion possible: curry-flavored poop. I then observed that Japanese girls seem to really like poop (which they do), and things went downhill from there. I brought sunglasses to practice the other day, and suffered the subsequent penalty of twenty or so minutes of "cool" looks from half the boys team as they all tried them on. I've eavesdropped on multiple conversations about hopelessly unrequited love that I had to do my best to take seriously. Unable to resist the temptation to have a point, I guess, I have to conclude that this venture into Bukatsudou has given the humanity, and more importantly, the adorable frivolity, to the students at my school, and that sir, rules. Put simply and without an eloquent flourish to round it out.

A Nod to Bukatsudo

The phrase "Bukatsudou" literally translates to "club activities," but were you to take a more holistic, emotive approach to the translation, you might come up with a much longer term that sounds more like a way of life than a good way to waste a lunch period. There is a character in Japanese, 道,　"Dou," that essentially means "path, road, way," and it can express either the most plebian patch of concrete you've ever set foot upon (歩道 (hodou) for example, means sidewalk), or the other kind of life-governing "path," the kind that often, perhaps even necessarily, tend towards the transcendental (武士道 (bushidou) means, roughly and ineptly translated, "the way of the sword," or perhaps "the way of the samurai.") The "dou" in Bukatsudou (部活動) is not that "dou," but I want to suggest that it probably should be. If I were to spell "Bukatsudo" in Japanese, I would spell it 部活道, and I would translate it as "The Way of the Middle School Student."

Clubs in Japanese schools are nothing like clubs in American schools. When you think of clubs in America, you think of eminently marginal, fringey little unions that meet once a week at lunch somewhere and maybe occasionally plan a weekend outing. When you think of clubs in America you think of Debate Club, Environmental Club, Key Club, Anime Club. You think of them generally as a way to boost that extra-curricular section of your college applications, or, alternatively, as a way to goof off with a theme. Critically, you think of them as being fully separate from the much more visible, generally more serious team sports category of after-school-activities. Sure you've got your Swing Club and your Dinosaur Club (I just looked up a list of club activities at my high school because I couldn't come up with any more and they actually have a fucking dinosaur club), but compared to say, the Football Team, or the Basketball Team, who cares? Not only are clubs second tier socially, but they also just lag as a commitment of time and energy.

Enter the Way of the Middle Schooler. Clubs in Japanese Middle Schools take sports teams in American Middle Schools and bludgeon them over the head with a kendo sword; I'm not even going to mention what they do to clubs. Part of it is just a semantic difference, however. Club activities in Japan encompass all after-school activities, as everything from the Brass Band to the Soccer team fall under the umbrella of Bukatsu, whereas in American schools there is a stricter delineation made between the kids who spend their afternoons painting pictures and those who spend theirs kicking balls. Semantics aside, however, clubs in Japan are pretty much across the board a bigger commitment than anything American middle schoolers participate in, be it a club or a team.

I could go on like this forever, cutting cultural differences out of the fabric of my afternoons, but by this point I'm fairly sick of turning my life into an unending comparative anthropology classroom, so as much as is possible, I want to look at the Way of the Middle Schooler without overtly filtering it through an American consciousness. Whoops, I'm writing this so I guess that's an impossible task, but, Bukatsudo is fucking sweet and I don't want to taint it by punctuating it with an incessant, and ultimately misdirecting, chorus of "In America, we do it THIS way, but!"'s. Who cares about American Middle Schools anyway, they suck. However, this post is already horrifically polluted with them. I guess there's no escaping cross-cultural analysis in this post, so I've decided to finish here. Let the next post deal with the natives as they are, not as reflected off of the colonizers. Stupidest line ever.

In summation, clubs in America suck and aren't really a big deal, but clubs in Japan are EVERYTHING and are pretty awesome because of it. Stay tuned if you'd like to learn why.

An Event that Defies Explanation

I mean, it probably doesn't, but I'm not really feeling like words at the moment, so I will insert (moving) pictures instead. This is what I did last weekend. You only really have to watch the first twenty seconds or so unless you want to see an oldish man bite it and get laughed at. I get bumped out of the picture by a drunk dude posing as one of those wind-up cymbal-clashing monkeys and never make it to the fore again. I'm not really sure what happens in the second video.