Child Slave Labor

Yesterday I looked at the schedule for Thursday and it said, “Arrival of the new 3nensei and preparation for the new school year.” It is a sign that I have been here too long when I can sense that “preparation” is a secret word for “exploiting our kids to clean our dirty-ass, nasty school.” Sure enough, that’s exactly what we did!

The new 3nensei arrived at 9 in the morning, and by 9:01 they had the wet rags out and were cleaning every surface you could find (except for the walls, because Japanese people somehow don’t realize that walls should ever be cleaned). The sad thing is that the whole school was cleaned by students two weeks ago, but the damn Gunma winds brought TONS of dirt in through the closed windows, so everything was nasty again. A mixture of guilt and wanting to escape the boredom of my desk enticed me into helping the poor kids, but I am afraid I was worse than the 14 year-olds (13? Eh, I dunno how old they are). All of the kids were busy wiping the floors with wet towels (um, why not use mops?), and I was the ADD one that was like, “Hey, look! A bag full of ball crawl balls!” *throws them at kids* Hmm, I don’t think anyone was very impressed. When the jobs got too down-and-dirty, I would be the administrator and see how the kids were doing on other floors. I sort of helped, tho! I also succeeded in breathing in gallons of dust, so that has to count for some amount of work.

Yesterday Cindy and I were saying how ridiculous it is that the students are in charge of doing so much shit, and it really is true. Seriously, why should it be their job to come in during spring break and clean floors, desks, cubby holes, etc? Also, you really do get what you pay for when you have students do all of the shit for free. Japanese schools would be a LOT cleaner, hygienic, and attractive (well, as attractive as our prison schools can be) if they hired janitors. The only janitor-ish guy a school has is the groundskeeper, who pretty much just trims trees all day long (might I add that my groundskeeper is a bit too over-zealous with his job, and we pretty much only have stumps remaining at this point).

Having said all of this, I do have a lot of respect for the kids for not rebelling and doing a nation-wide towel-burning protest. I only helped for like 45 minutes and I was bitching and ready for lunch and a nap. The kids, on the other hand, didn’t think anything of it, and were barefoot, cleaning the halls (eww). So, Japanese kids around the country, my hat goes off to you. Let you never go to another country and realize that you shouldn’t be forced into doing all of this shit!