狛江高校 Komae High School

Those of you who remember Mikiko Kohno, our Fulbright Japanese Teaching Assistant at UAB in 2008 and 2009, will be pleased to know that she is now a high school English teacher in Komae, on the outskirts of Tokyo. Visiting a Japanese high school always brings back memories for me as a former JET teacher teaching in many different schools. For the UAB students, however, high school is the site of countless anime and manga. In a way, it was like walking into a real live anime. The architecture, the layout of classrooms, the uniforms, the after-school activities, it was all there.

Here's the English class of Mikiko, er, Kohno-sensei, with UAB students interspersed throughout the classroom. Just as we like to do when we have Japanese visitors to our Japanese classes, she had the class talk part of the time in English for her students' benefit and part in Japanese for our students. There's Tyler speaking Japanese.

Here's John in another after-school class for kids who are going to visit their sister school in Australia. There's Mikiko's happy face mugging for the camera. Those lucky students!

Japanese high school teachers have a lot tighter schedule than their American counterparts, but from the school, Mikiko took us to a Vietnamese restaurant just down the street near the station.

Here are some of us with Mikiko in the Vietnamese restaurant. We were just fortunate that day that Mikiko could join us. A Japanese high school teacher's job usually includes guiding some after-school club activity, with "after school" usually including Saturdays and Sundays. Mikiko is the coach of the girls' basketball club, which took a day off the day we visited so she could do stuff like go with us to the Vietnamese restaurant. Before we left the school, she showed us other club activities. Judging by how single-mindedly each club was engaged in their respective activities, I figured it was a big sacrifice for girls' basketball to take a day off. Sorry, Komae HS girls' basketball. Thanks for loaning us your coach for dinner.