And so, with its usual unstoppable momentum, April has rolled around and with it the start of the new school and business year. Sanae must contend with the most changes. She has been transferred to a new elementary school, though thankfully still within a 20 minute drive from home. But that is about all the gratitude she can evoke. The students are new, her fellow teachers new, the parents new, the routines, customs, and unwritten rules of behaviour all new too. It has placed her under immense, chocolate fueled pressure. The cumulative stress of wrapping up (or "snipping off") the loose ends in her old school and then subsequently looking for the threads of normalcy in her new school are enacting an ongoing, fingernails-bitten-to-the-quick toll.
One of the defining features of the Japanese education system (up to the tertiary level) is its systematic rotation of teachers between schools at 6 year intervals. There are, perhaps, solid, research based, informed policy reasons for this, but damned if I (or Sanae) know what they are. When I look at her, all I see is unwanted and unwarranted stress.
And this is replicated right across the country, and not just in schools either. Civil servants, public sector employees, police, firefighters, not to mention the vast majority of employees in private companies, are, every Spring, subject to a vast process of internal migration. And it is not just jobs that change. Home addresses change too, as do schools, friends, neighbours, neighbourhoods, and the daily patterns and practices of every day life. All disrupted, all have to be started and seeded again.
So, in Japan in April you see (and experience) stress. Not cherry blossoms. Stress. The longer that I live in this country, the more convinced I am that this is a society that exists in a perpetual, self-sustaining state of stress. For historical, geographical, and tectonic reasons, the easy option is never an option.
Such a deeply ingrained attitude makes for wonderfully reliable cars, but a forever fraught place to live.
