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Winner of an children's poetry contest, written by a first-grader:
Hey, mum...
Don't look at your smart-phone
Look at me |
The thing kids in orphanages said to us most often wasn’t “play
with me” or “carry me” but “look at me, watch me.” Whenever we went to play
there would be a cluster of children around us all the time, calling out “watch
me do handstands!” “Look at me run to that tree!” At school they would be in a
class of 30 to 40. They’d come home to an institution where again, they’d be
one of 50, 60, even 100. What they wanted most from us was our undivided
attention, our focus on them and them alone, even for a few minutes. Look at
me, watch me, see me. Tiger’s orphanage
had kept a photo album for him, and when he first came to live with us he loved
pointing to group photographs and asking me to guess which one was him. It blew
his mind that I could identify him as a five year old in his kindergarten class
photo or that I recognised him in his baby pictures. How did I know it was him?
He would ask me to do it again, over and over. Look at me, watch me, see me.
In my first year as an ALT I taught a 4th grade elementary
class and noticed a gregarious boy with shocking bleached-blond hair who had a
gift for languages and was generally charming and hilarious. The home room teacher
was going out of her way to be nice to him, and I had been at that school for
nearly a year but had never seen him before, so I assumed he was a new transfer
student. He was barefoot; maybe he’d brought the wrong shoes for the new school
and taken them off in embarrassment, I thought. I asked about him after the
class finished. “Oh no, he’s been here since kindergarten” the teacher told me.
“He is often absent though. He has many younger siblings and they’re abused, so
he stays at home to look after them.” I stared at her, blankly. What did she
mean, they were abused? If the school knew about abuse and had for years, why had
nothing been done? A few months later the boy, I’ll call him Shouma, moved up
into 5th grade, meaning I saw him more often (5th and 6th
graders have more English lessons). He was the kind of boy every Shonen Jump
manga features; always smiling, throwing his head back to laugh in an
exaggerated “HAHA”, holding his rice bowl to his face and shoveling food in so
fast you feared he’d choke then demanding seconds with his mouth still full. He
loved to make everyone laugh, and he was universally liked, but close to no one
in particular. I asked him once about his lack of shoes, and he told me that it
was painful to wear them. He pointed cheerfully to cigarette burns on his feet
before running off to play.
At the time I couldn’t understand why no one seemed to be
doing anything except being extra nice to him. Shouma is part of the reason I
initially did the research that led to
this post on the situation regarding child abuse and institutionalisation in Japan. Although ALT support has been
reduced even from the low level we had when I was on the JET Programme, we did at
least have periodic meetings where we could discuss issues with our peers. I
raised Shouma at one such meeting, and another ALT told me that she’d been
asked by her school to be particularly encouraging of one female student,
because “her uncle rapes her but she doesn’t have anywhere else to live”. We sat silently, not knowing how to help each other. For a
long time I was simply angry, and felt betrayed by the school. Surely they had
some training for this, why was I the only one who seemed to be worrying about him?
As I learned more, I began to understand their position a little better.
There
would be relatively little a social worker could do to intervene. If the
parents could be persuaded to give up the children voluntarily they would
almost certainly have been separated and placed into different care situations.
For an older child who has been responsible for keeping younger siblings alive,
feeding them and sheltering them from blows with his or her own body, to be separated
and have no idea what had become of them would be the cause of intolerable anguish.
The most likely outcome for Shouma would be placement in a large orphanage,
with all of the attendant issues that come with institutionalisation. I don’t
want to suggest that abuse is ever OK, but there is some research to indicate
that abused children may fare better than neglected children and even the best
large scale orphanages offer little more than benign emotional neglect and at
worst are sites of abuse themselves. I don’t know what the school’s reasoning
was, but as I did more research I came to feel that perhaps trying to get
social services involved would be unhelpful and potentially damaging. I moved
from rage at the teachers to rage at the entire system. There are many wonderful
individuals who have dedicated their lives to trying to improve the system, but
Japan still fundamentally fails its most vulnerable. I watched Shouma whenever
I could. When the kids were working quietly at their desks and he no longer
felt the centre of attention, his face changed. I saw a different Shouma. He
seemed much smaller, somehow.
When he graduated elementary school I
cast my eyes around the auditorium throughout the ceremony, wondering what his
parents looked like. Wondering if I had the courage to try and say something to
them in my imperfect Japanese, which becomes even worse when I am trying to communicate
something emotional. I watched him as everyone gathered outside afterwards for
photographs. He parents weren’t there. No one had come to watch him. He kicked
off his shoes and walked home alone, his diploma in one hand and his shoes in
the other.
A few weeks later junior high began. The rules are stricter there;
he had to dye his hair back to black. He took the opportunity of the new
environment to ramp up his class-clown act. I remember one class in particular
he’d taken down a wire coat hanger (we use them to hang cleaning rags to dry in
the classrooms) and twisted it into the shape of a giant erect penis, which he
held in his crotch and complained loudly about how stiff it was. The teacher
said “put that down immediately” so Shouma used his other hand to try to bend
it downwards, but as soon as he released it, of course it flicked back up
again. “I’m trying” he yelled brightly, “but it just won’t stay down”. The
entire class was in hysterics and even the teacher had trouble keeping her
stern face on. As the year progressed, though, cracks began to show. He was an incredibly
clever kid, and the pace in elementary school is so slow you can probably pay
attention 10% of the time and keep up if you’re bright. By junior high though, everything
accumulates quickly and if you missed the key point last week you’ll find
yourself with no idea what is going on in this week’s class. His innate
intelligence stopped being enough to carry him through, and he grades dropped
badly. His need to be the centre of attention and make everyone laugh became increasingly
painful to watch, and as the other kids got used to him he began pushing his
behaviour to further and further extremes trying to get reactions.
My desk at the junior high was opposite the school nurse’s,
and she would often treat minor complaints there rather than in the infirmary. We
saw a lot of Shouma. One morning he came in early, before classes had begun, asking
for a dressing for what looked to me like a large burn on his arm. As she
patched him up the nurse quizzed him in her kind but firm way: “How did you get
hurt like this so early in the morning?” “I fell on the way to school” he
answered. “If you fell outside there would be dirt and debris in here, but it’s
clean” she chided. “I feel in the corridor, inside school but on my way to
class” he amended. “It’s pretty bad” she said, “shall I send someone to clean
up the blood in the corridor?” He shifted uncomfortably. “I cleaned it up
before I came here” he said, looking at the ground. I listened curiously. I
assumed the elementary school would have notified the junior high about his
home situation, it’s the kind of information teachers are usually careful to
share, but I wasn’t sure. I asked the nurse if she knew he was being abused and
she said “oh yes, I know, he lies about all his injuries. But until he tells me
for himself there’s nothing I can do except treat the wounds.”
Second grade junior high (8th grade) is hard for
most kids. Helpfully, in my experience, they all go through puberty at once and
get the nasty moody part over and done in the one year. It makes them not very
fun to teach, but it does mean they are back to their usual lovely selves by
third (9th) grade. Shouma lost something that year. I don’t know how
to describe it, really, except that he had always been so bright, and the light
seemed to go out. Around that time we were well into our adoption application.
Our social worker asked us bluntly “how old are you willing to go?” and hating
the idea of having to say no to any child, we settled on 12. I was 28 and in
principal in Australia the adoptive parents should be 18 years older than the
adoptee, so we were pushing it, but we assumed (erroneously as it turned out)
that we’d be waiting for a few years before a placement anyway. Nevertheless,
when we said “12” I immediately thought of Shouma. There are children like him
all over Japan, and although he wasn’t being placed for adoption I still felt
like we’d just said “no” to him. It’s an awful (but necessary, I do understand
that) part of the adoption process, listing the children you will say no to. “Yes”
I wrote for cerebral palsy. Under autism I wrote “yes if high functioning”.
Under Down’s Syndrome I wrote “no” and struggled with myself for days.
A couple of months before the summer holidays in Shouma’s
second year of junior high I got a call that we had been matched with a little
boy. I was given just a few cursory details over the phone in that initial
call. The little boy is now our son, Tiger. But his real name he shares with
Shouma, and that shook me profoundly. It was my last term teaching with the JET
Programme. On my last day at Shouma’s school he had a fever. He was sitting, slumped
on a chair in the infirmary waiting for permission to go home, and missed my
farewell class. I wanted to say goodbye but I didn’t want to wake him up. I
tried to write him a letter. “I’ll always think of you as the boy with blond
hair” I wrote. “You are very special to me. You share a name with my son, and I
think about you when I see him.” What else could I say? Like every other adult
in his life, for the past four years I had been a bystander to his abuse. I
left the letter beside him without waking him up.
I looked at Shouma, I watched him. I saw him, and I did nothing.
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