Today I'd like to tell you about the elementary school I attended. The elementary school I attended was the same one that my grandfather and father had also attended. It was the oldest elementary school in our town, though not the biggest. Each grade except the first had three classes.
When I entered the school, there were only two classes in the first grade, reflecting the falling birthrate. Each class had between thirty and forty pupils.
As I heard, the maximum number of pupils in one class was regulated below forty by some kind of educational law. Suppose there are 126 pupils in a grade. If they are divided into three classes, the number of pupils in one class is forty-two. This number exceeds the limits regulated by the law. Then this grade should have four classes with thirty-one pupils in two classes and thirty-two pupils in the other two classes.
In Japan, in most of the school districts, when the pupils go to school in the morning, they are not allowed to go by him- or herself. The school districts are usually divided into smaller zones, called "kouku" in Japanese.
The students living in the same "kouku" meet at a designated spot every morning.
One of the boys and one of the girls in the sixth grade are appointed leaders of the group. Led by those leaders, the students walk to school in single file, usually with the boys' file preceding the girls' file, which I'm afraid reflects the male dominant Japanese society.
On their way to school they are required to take one of the routes that were chosen to be safe by the local traffic safety association.
At street corners and other places on the way to school where the traffic is busy, the parents of the students on duty, mostly the mothers, wait for the group with a yellow flag and help the students cross the streets.
I have heard that recently many mothers are working and cannot do the duty in the morning, and that the grandparents of the students, both grandfathers and grandmothers, have been doing the job. I think it is good for the health of those grandparents.
When they cross the street, they are required to raise their right hand and bow to the drivers stopping for them, saying "Thank you!" Since I am left-handed, I always felt it awkward to raise my right hand when crossing the street.
When I was an elementary school student, on our way back home, except on special occasions, like on the opening or closing ceremony day, when school was over at the same time for all the grades, we came home by ourselves. Some students preferred to go back home alone.
Others liked going back home by twos and threes with good friends.
Japanese school children look forward to the first day of a new school year with a mixed feeling of expectation and anxiety. It is the day when new class teachers and new class arrangements are announced.
When we start a new school year, we have a new class teacher and new classmates. It is sad to part with the old classmates in the previous school year, but at the same time it is exciting to have new classmates.
At my school, the new class arrangements at the start of a new school year are announced on the bulletin board in the main hall. However, a new class teacher is announced by the school principal only after the opening ceremony of a new school year.
On that day I hurried to school, much earlier than usual. When I arrived at school, the new class arrangements had already been put on the bulletin board. I searched for my name among the three fifth grade classes.
I found my name in Class B. I also found the names of some of my best classmates in Class B, but couldn't find some others. They had been assigned either to Class A or Class C.
According to the directions on the bulletin board, we entered the classrooms designated for each class and waited for some teacher to take us to the gym, where the opening ceremony was to be held.
We walked in two lines into the gym, the boys in one line and the girls in another line, and side by side. In the gym, the boys and girls in each class each stood in single file, with the shortest boy or girl at the beginning of the line and the tallest one at the end.
Among the familiar faces of teachers, we could find three new faces; two female teachers and one young male teacher.
My heart swelled with expectations that he might be our class teacher.
In the ceremony, the principal gave a short speech, encouraging us to start our new school year with refreshed spirits. I liked our principal, because his speech had always been brief and entertaining.
He was a pot-bellied man in his late fifties with a shining bald head. He became the principal of our school when I became a fourth grader and retired in the same year as we graduated.
After his speech, the principal introduced three new teachers to us; two female teachers and one male teacher.
As I had presumed, the male teacher was fresh from the university. His name was Mr. Tadashi Hara. He was a stout young man of medium height with a sun-tanned face.
According to the principal's introduction, he had just graduated from the School of Education, Gifu University in March, and majored in physical education, having specialized in gymnastics.
The time finally arrived when the class assignments of the teachers were to be announced. This time the head teacher announced the assignments of the class teachers.
The head teacher that year was a female teacher in her early fifties. She started the announcements from the first grade.
I waited anxiously and in some suspense for our class teacher to be announced. When the name of Mr. Hara was read out as the class teacher of 5B, I could hear some students of my class utter slight cries of delight. I could also hear the sighs of disappointment among the students of the other classes.
Mr. Hara was my class teacher for two years; in the fifth and sixth grades. Since he was a gymnast, he was particularly eager to teach us many gymnastic skills.
One of the skills I was the best at in my class was a somersault. I could do a triple somersault with ease.
I sometimes even turned five or six somersaults, while most of my classmates could do only a single somersault.
I was also very good at cartwheel. I could turn five cartwheels at one time, sometimes six. The skill I was not good at was vaulting a horse.
As Mr. Hara told us, a vaulting horse used at Japanese schools was introduced from Swedish gymnastics, and not similar to those used at the Olympics Games. I've learned recently that the vaulting horse of this kind is also called a Swedish box.
The Swedish box consists of several stacks of box-like wooden frames. The beginners start to vault over a low horse which consists of two or three stacks of "boxes."
If they succeed in vaulting the low horse, more "boxes" will be stacked to make the horse higher. The best jumper in our class could vault seven stacks of "boxes."
I was not so good at horizontal bar, either. I was no good at pull-over mount. I also hated pull-ups. I could do only three pull-ups, while many of my classmates could do more than five.
At the start of the PE classes, we always did some warm- up exercises. They were made up of side body bend, chest and shoulder stretch, head rotation, forward trunk bend, and trunk rotation."
After those exercises, Mr. Hara sometimes told us to do several push-ups and sit-ups as parts of warm-ups. I didn't like those part of warm-ups. When we had time, we did the same exercises as cool-downs.
In summertime, Mr. Hara gave us many swimming lessons in our school swimming pool. Till that time I could swim only breaststroke. Thanks to his good lessons, I could learn to swim crawl stroke and backstroke.
There was no class reshuffle when we became sixth graders, and Mr. Hara was our class teacher in the sixth grade, too.
He is now in his early thirties and teaching at a different elementary school.
We have had our class reunion twice so far; the first one in the spring just before we started our high schools, and the second time during the summer vacation when we were second year students at high schools. I worked as the coordinator at both times.
On those occasions, he said that our class was the most impressive class for him, because it was his first class that he taught as a new teacher right after he graduated from the university. We are planning to have our third class reunion this summer. My former classmates have been asking me to coordinate the reunion this time too.
We are looking forward to seeing Mr. Hara at that time.
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