Cross-cultural communication （110）　

110) Cross-cultural experiences in high school
I attended Osaka Prefectural Kitano High School. This was in the late 1960s. It was the oldest high school in Osaka, and it had some interesting traditions that had been carried on since long ago. For example, the cafeteria that served coffee and light meals was called the “Tea Room” (abbreviated as “Tea”). When students from other schools came to play in inter-school matches, etc., if we said something like “Let's go to the Tea after the match,” they would often say, “That's very stylish. But it was just a normal high school canteen.

I think that wherever you go, if a teacher is sick or something and they have to take a day off, the class will be canceled. At Kitano high school, we called these canceled classes “blanks” in English. During a blank, if no one in the class has any opinions, you can do whatever you like, and the tennis club guys would play tennis on the tennis courts when no one else was using them.

If someone expressed an opinion and said, “I want to listen to Teacher XX's lecture (I think there was also some kind of English name for this, but it was more than 50 years ago, so I've forgotten),” and most people agreed, then the general affairs officer (the class president) would go and negotiate with that teacher. The popular teachers were those who had a lot of experience abroad. Mr. S, a star long-distance runner in the track and field club at J University, also taught gymnastics at Kitano, but he often led the Japanese high school team on overseas trips, and he told us about his experiences on these trips. He told us, for example, that in the 1960s, the Soviet Union (now Russia) was spending a huge amount of money on military and space programs, but the lives of ordinary people were very frugal. For example, the most popular souvenir was pantyhose, which could be bought quite easily in Japan at the time.

Mr. H, our geography teacher, had a long face and was nicknamed “Bachin, 馬珍” (meaning “even a horse is rare”, he had a long face like a horse) decades before we were his students. By the way, Mr. Bachin was a tennis expert when he was a student, and he often led the high school tennis team on overseas trips. The story that left the biggest impression on me from his lectures was the one about his trip to China. This was when Mr. Bachin took the students who represented Japan in high school tennis to the People's Republic of China for the first time. As it was the first time visiting a communist country, he was understandably quite nervous. When the group entered the hotel where they were staying, of course the students were assigned to share rooms. Mr. Bachin asked the person in charge from the Chinese side, “In which room should I stay? and the person in charge of the Chinese side replied, “We have prepared a special room, of course a private room, for Teacher H.” The teacher then asked, “I hear that China is a communist country that does not discriminate on the difference of status or age. The reply he received to this question was a single Chinese word, ‘Tano Taro, 多能多労’ (meaning ‘more talents, more adversitiy’).

After finishing writing this article, I searched online for this “Chinese” phrase “Tano Taro” to check whether my memory was accurate. However, I couldn't find anything that matched it. Instead, I found the phrase “Nosha Taro, 能者多労”, which means exactly the same thing, and it even said that the phrase originated from the writings of Zhuangzi, 荘子. So, was it my mistake, or was it Bachin-sensei who misunderstood or misremembered? It's a mystery now.

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