Meet a Sensei

This is the beginning of a series highlighting the more interesting of the teachers at my schools. I’ll begin with an easy one, brown suit. He is named so because…well…he has been wearing the same brown suit since the day I met him over a year ago. I could be wrong and maybe he’s like Shaggy or Homer Simpson, keeping a closet full of the same outfit. I would like to believe this because his suit is never all that dirty for the amount of time he has been wearing it. Sadly enough, I only noticed his suit fetish about a month ago. I guess he picked a good colour for going unnoticed. As a testament to my occasionally boredom, starting today I am taking note on his tie. I’m 90% sure that the tie is part of the outfit. One thing that I did notice from the start was that he was wearing shoes with a huge hole in them. Throughout the year, this hole has widened so that a full half of his foot is sticking out of the shoe. His glasses have a large crack in them too. This may just be his style. He’s a nice enough person. Even though when he talks to me, he speaks really fast in local hillbilly speak so I don’t get a thing. One of my favorite “brown suit” moments was when he asked me to write something for the PTA newsletter. I wrote something to the effect of “I would like to thank everyone for being so kind to me and helping me settle into my new life in Japan. I really appreciate the kindness of everyone”. He then brought me the published copy of the newsletter a couple weeks later where I had said “When you helped me, I am happy. I look forward to my year in Japan. Please”. He explained to me later that he had translated my Japanese to be more “Japanese". It should be noted that Brown Suit wore that suit all through the hot muggy Japanese summer. While the rest of us at least wore short sleeves and some (like me) wore shorts, he was faithful to his dress code. I suspect that he has a mini A/C unit built into the suit.