In the cramped classroom at Kikokushijo Academy the air conditioning hums its labored, circulating breath. We still are sweating. And I’m tried. Not sleepy, but all the talking all morning and regulating who reads what paragraph and staying alert enough to ask pointed questions about vocabulary and patient enough to correct hesitant or mangled pronunciation has drained me. Then I robotically administer another quiz for reading comprehension. For the elementary school students, these classes must be kept fun with a sort of emotional sleight of hand to disguise, if barely, the disciplinary fact of compulsory education. They aren’t quite at the brink of exam hells where all study, all information, is purely and totally instrumentalized to achieving a triumphant score on an elite school’s entrance exam. These are the last few years where learning can still wander and play still sneaks in and alters spaces of schooling.

I usually save the reading to the end, because it’s less grueling than grammar, but I flipped the pattern today. Now or later, the students are unfazed. Nana is predictably soft-spoken but thorough. I have to remind her to speak up. The AC is a droning white noise. Ken is nearly falling asleep across from her, nodding forward. His brush cut shows his scalp bejeweled with sweat. I feel a drop run down my spine. Emiko is fidgeting next to me, her back to the door. Her Nintendo DS is temptingly close and I watch through hooded eyes as she stealthily slides her hand towards it until she can finger the strap thick with small, cute versions of characters suspended from tethers lashed to the hard plastic of the game device. Omnipresent adornments, Allison says “these commodity spirits are ‘shadow families’: constant and reliable companions that are soothing in these postindustrial times of nomadacism, orphanism, and stress” (Allison 2006, 91). Emiko touches the plastic figures in a sequence repeatedly as if to rhythmically reassure them, then stops to rub one aggressively before running her hand up the cords to rest on the Nintendo itself in momentary calm, and then return to a sequential caress of the figures once more. The private, almost unconscious ritual fascinates me as it fills the space of boredom for both of us unexpectedly. The symbolic meaning of the trinket-totems is not apparent and the children change these adornments so regularly that a claim of a “shadow family” ignores what is working: the soothing tactility of the objects themselves with their known physicality and proximity. The investments the children make in the symbolic world are various, constant, and always breaking apart to allow new ideas, new connections, loyalties, and desires. It is the materiality that persists—familiar objects stuffed into worn bookbags, taken from frayed pen cases and carefully arranged in specific order on the table.

I’m wary. Though the objects comfort, I doubt their ability to tranquilize. Emiko is unpredictable. She’s one of the few unruly students and hers is a wilder and yet more determined sort of chaos. She seems bored and discontent but there is something more fractious and fractal about the way she is in the classroom and toward the teachers.  How a teacher responds to her serves as an informal test of their capabilities.  I struggle to marshal my patience. She is a constant source of disruption to the smooth flow of the two-hour class I am tasked to attempt. In moments like this I regret that I’m a participant-worker and not just an insulated observer who can conceal an exhausted affect and wandering attention. The kids, beneath the torpor of the afternoon, are still alert to the rhythm of the class and my blatantly fading control of time codes, managed participation, and our mutual engagement on the task we arrive at from ostensibly different sides. Things run amok. Breakdown feel imminent in the machine of making kids happy. I am not trying to be two selves—teacher and researcher—but just hold an outpost long enough till the bell rings. Who is a stranger to this?

The trinkets attached to Emiko’s DS don't seem to be so reliably soothing as she squirms. Ken jerks awake as she jostles the flimsy table. Emiko hates being here. Her older brother already quit coming and she is vocal about wanting to follow his own path of attrition to freedom. She comes because her father is British and wants to be sure she develops a working use of English so she can be able to attend to English-language schools. English is sign of cosmopolitanism for Japanese adults who attend conversation classes in the evenings and who may be planning a vacation to Honolulu or L.A. or London, or maybe hoping for an overseas corporate transfer.

For Emiko, English class is not an escape route but indentured cultural servitude brought on by the conflicting demands of her family’s lived and hoped-for trajectories. She is here, in Japan, but her dad is already anticipating a future elsewhere. Her racial/cultural liminality is inscribed in her skin, making her life in Japanese schools profoundly different than those of her ethnically Japanese peers at K.A. Thomas points out “bi-cultural children [have] a hard time and some (Emiko) actively rebelled against the Kikokushijo identity” –an identity the school is intent on cultivating as potential resource for a personal and familial future. On our breaks she eagerly engages the other girls in Japanese: “Where did you buy that pencase? Let’s go to the conbini and get chips! Lemme see your DS—did you bring any new games?” The other girls awkwardly respond in English—they are discomfited by Emiko’s bold defiance of the English-only rule at the school. It’s why she’s always trying to convince the other girls to go to the nearby shops, to get out of earshot of Kanna, the cheerful administrator who belies her good-nature with a firm chiding to any sly transgressors of the rule who might attempt to chat in Japanese. Getting away from the school with her classmates gives her a momentary opening to remake her relation to them in Japanese space and through its linguistic sense. Emiko cows the other girls in the class but they still plaintively attempt to negotiate around her without directly defying her.

Kanna speculates that being mixed-race makes it especially hard for her in her normal Japanese school. “But she’s also just a really wild child!” she laughs. Like most of the kids, Emiko travels to K.A. alone by train, though her commute is far longer than most since she lives far west, beyond Yokohama. The irony, Kanna, tells me, is that her parents run an eikawa or English conversation school, out of their home. So Emiko’s willful resistance to English seems even more specifically rooted in the family’s own survival strategies around the language. She had spent a few months recently in Australia living with a relative but the experience appeared to have barely improved her English skills. I tried to engage her in sharing stories about her time in Australia, both as a means to get her to speak at length in English and to perhaps develop a bond with all the other kids who had lived abroad. I hoped at least give her an opening to her assert herself as a globalized equal with them in terms of experience. My overtures failed. She was taciturn, or boisterous, or simmering with low-flame anger and frustration. I had strategically not insisted she put her DS away during class time but my generous lapse seemed to go unnoticed and the device wasn’t the soothing object of attachment I’d hoped.

“Emiko, would you please continue?” We were reading a short story about a Massachusetts farmboy during the Revolutionary War. While the other kids were making a valiant effort to plow through it, despite its totally alien content, Emiko wasn’t at all interested in even pretending to be interested. “Nnnnnn,” she half-whined, half-grunted. “Emiko?” “NO.” Her face was devoid of emotion. Then abruptly grinned. “The story is always so baka.” So stupid. She emphasizes this heavily, drawing out each syllable. Baaaaa-kaaaaa. She was getting no argument from me. The other kids giggled. The mix of English and Japanese was her trademark and a trusted technique to demonstrate her unbowed defiance while claiming a different identity, one in which she appeared foreign but perverted this surface difference through a fierce assertion of Japaneseness, actively rejecting any assumptions of globalized Otherness.

She sneered like a sukeban, a girl gang leader, gazing around the classroom. Mami, who sat across from Emiko, looked back with sleepy eyes, while Kouta glanced at me quizzically. His alertness was my cue to adroitly pivot. “Kouta, would you do Emiko the favor of reading the next ‘stupid’ passage?” Acknowledging her own dismissive opinion of the text deflated her momentarily. As Kouta was in the middle of a sentence about some New England militia assembling on some colonial green, I saw Emiko fiddling with a pencil. She was gently but insistently pushing her right foot against the table leg, causing it to sway again. With my left hand pressed flat on the tabletop I steadied it and turned to Kouta, who’d paused. “Keep going…”

Bright pain erupted across the back of my left hand. A dot of blood was forming where she had stabbed me. Emiko screeched a sharp laugh, clutching the pencil in an uncertain triumph. She rocked back in her plastic chair. Then she spiked a pencil down on the table top with a bang.  More of the point splintered off.

A smudge of lead from the point shadowed the blood where it had first broken, puncturing my skin. The students were rapt, even a little frightened. I felt like I was in a surreal Afterschool Special where schools were unmasked as prisons and the adults stripped of their masquerading, artificial power by a shock of violence. I looked back at Emiko who was attempting to compose her face into an imitation of amused innocence. She still gripped the pencil while with her other hand she unconsciously stroked her Ninentendo DS.

“Kouta, can you continue with the stupid story till it’s over so we don’t have to read it anymore?”

“Why, yes, I would be happy to!” Kouta replied in a gruff, comical voice, seizing back the teetering moment of chaos as we all spun wildly with different emotions, all shaded with shock. With mock officiousness, acting as if miffed that he’d been interrupted by Emiko’s assault, Kouta picked up smoothly where he’d abruptly stopped a moment ago.


Emiko had countered the act of talking with her own embodied resistance. In the same basic spatial arrangement as the hostess club, we were assembled around a table. I was attempting to craft the structures of student subjectivities, but with a difference (of English, of “open futures,” of a liberalized education regime). This difference was inflected through my own attitude and (clearly failed) empathetic intentions signaled on different registers. For Nana and Ken, the class was a drudge, but they were good-natured, and they both placidly went along with the idea that their futures turned upon K.A. and their ability to succeed on those looming entrance exams. I surreptitiously wiped the blood on my trousers. My affective labor had broken down and met with Emiko’s own form of breakdown. Where were the intended social relations now? Emiko’s attack was so sudden and out of place it felt like an act from another script had gotten scrambled into our own repetitively staged behaviors. My breakdown was mundane, familiar. Hers was a violent instance of puncture, tearing open the affective skin of the class and collapsing the abstractness of potential subjectivities and futures onto the very materiality of our bodies.

Emiko punctures my skin and punctures a performance.  My body obliges her as prop. An eleven year-old girl with twisted up grammar and an attitude to match, stuck her cheap No. 2 pencil in my hand. That snap and the blood and then the strange way she quickly receded back into an approximation of the good (Japanese) girl—all of it surprised us both. Her outburst breaks the spell of affective, pedagogical relations between us, where English-as-commodity is smoothly transferred so that the kids can keep their options open on a different, globalized future and ameliorate the unseen risks of a changing Japan. She had taken stock of the risks and had enough. The threat to her tenuous Japanese identity was too much.  

I don’t ask her anything. What am I, a fucking cop? And I don’t snitch on her either. What am I doing in this classroom, smaller than a closet, batting around language like a novelty balloon? Too heavy, it keeps drifting forlornly to the floor. I am here to experience, unexpectedly get my flesh gouged by a pencil, and then speculate. All the kids in this room pass as fully Japanese until something slips out. Some are more prone to these slips than others, like Mami who fantasizes constantly about returning to the West Coast and insists that privately I call her Alana “because that is my L.A. name.”

Emiko is the only one who is marked as visibly different and she’s fighting a different struggle than all of her peers here. She refuses any affiliation with the Anglophonic world all around her because it all may be a mirage, a future she may never be able to capitalize on. I interpret it like this: the pencil in my hand was her spiking that global imaginary with the truth of her own frustration. There was nothing wrong with her. English as rehabilitation was a therapy she refused. She was bringing her difference to Japan because she had no choice. Thomas, one of the co-owners of the school wrote to me recently, “English, as a subject, is basically studying fiction, isn't it?” He meant the foundational texts for reading, but upon reflection, the question, in its doubled shading, was exactly the unasked problem of the future the kids faced. The language, in this moment, preserved a past, an experience overseas, often in very good schools, within which the parents usually had placed great stock for future returns. Thomas continued, “The ks [kikokushijo] have this fantastic advantage that will perish in 3 or so years, and we have a way of saving it. I've met many adult ks that say they wish KA was around when they were young.” Lost youth, lost advantage. Emiko isn’t mourning that future—it never was her past, only her paternity. It is the potential of the present she’s interested in; we take a break and she’s eager to musen setsuzoku—remotely connect—her DS to her classmate’s units so she can trounce them in Pokémon or Mario Kart.


After Emiko’s eruption, Nana looks more timid than usual. I think she might cry.

When the kids come back in ten minutes, we play hangman till the end of class. I make sure to draw the heads on the stickmen to resemble my own as accurately as possible.

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