The teachers around me are not bored, not yet. They are not even looking for things to do. Little tasks are left over from term-time, or thrown up by the small crowds of each club.
One teacher has been working through mounds of forms for our foreign exchange students, who’ll leave for Australia in three days. He’s going with them. There’s a perceptible holiday air to his labours. He would whistle, if people whistled here.
The PE teacher beside me has been crosschecking the expenditures of his club. He was audibly failing to match the figures of one piece or paper and another.
A couple of teachers were watching baseball in the lounge. I wondered if the TV was showing our team, who were playing today at Meiji Jingu. But the hats of neither batter nor pitcher matched ours; it was a mystery why they were so invested in the successes of the anonymous batting side.
Our head of year has had a sudden access of authority, with the end of term. He has sat in state behind his desk as pupil after pupil –more accurately, boy after boy –has been scruffed forward by his underlings, as offerings to his regal chastisement. Both in the lounge and in some of the smaller rooms, I found desks taken by students sentenced to lashes of the pen, condemned to over two pages of dense commentary on some trivial subject.
One teacher (my supervisor) spread out newspaper on his desk and proceeded to shave.
The JET? Japanese study, a fair bit of dossing with a colleague’s snaps of Taiwan. A lot of to-do lists. Distance in space and time seems to be an intrinsic condition of admin. Forms and the pieces of paper needed for forms will, as in a convoluted romance, come together only in a final chapter.