I told you I'd come up with some pictures. I apologize that they are small and blurry, but I hadn't had the foresight to figure out what size they were in. I guess my keitai camera isn't so good with motion either. But it's still handy as hell to have! Check out the 10 year old girls. So cute! And they could dance too ... This was at a small club called Fiesta in the nearby city of Kumagaya. Fun place, really. I guess you just have to know where to go around here to have fun .
I had the privilege today of watching a most interesting event at the school here. Four times every year, all of the students are gathered by grade (there are only 3 grades in Japanese high schools) in giant gyms to ... be inspected. It reminded me of way back in the day as kids in elementary school when we sat quietly at our desks while the school nurse picked through our hair looking for lice. The teachers weren't looking for lice this time. They were inspecting hair color, earrings, hair length, skirt length, and a variety of other things.
In Japan, it turns out one way to judge the quality of your school is to look at the kids. If they have multicolored asian dyejobs and pierced ears, you have a bunch of delinquents. I guess the higher quality the school, the more they look the same. It reminds me of my dad's story about catholic school, when a golfball would have to roll down the inside of your pant legs, otherwise they were too tight (this being when tight-ass pants were in, I imagine). So I watched as a bevy of teachers sifted through an entire grade of students, 280 in all, looking closely at hair color, earrings, fingernail length, even traces of makeup. Girls aren't allowed to wear makeup here, though it seems to me every single one does. I guess right before this thing (at least it wasn't a surprise inspection) there were fleets of girls in the bathroom wiping off their faces and hiking down their skirts.
I don't know as there is much disciplinary action available for kids who are "delinquent" and end up getting a checkmark for hair color or holes in their ears (guess that means I'll fail the test ...), but there's some sort of routine in the whole thing. I can't see how it is very effective due to this lack of disciplinary action (there doesn't seem to be anything like detention, and suspension happens very rarely), though the students do still follow the rules to a certain extent. I'm glad at some level for it, since I guess the asian mullet which appears so popular on young people in Japan would be rampant through the school. Sometimes I do find myself alarmed at the level of conformity that is expected, but of course my perspective derives from a very different culture. After all, per capita, how much violent crime do they have compared to the United States?
Nuff said. Maybe if my High School had a policy like this, I wouldn't have been driven to do something as stupid as grow my hair long and dye it black. Shudder.