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.
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