Our Japanese intern arrived just a few weeks ago. From the castellated, beautiful city of Hameji she came, full of eastern promise. With great good humour, she settled in remarkably quickly.
It was not long before we had her correcting spellings and tables tests, the first of many things she was to find strangely abstruse. In Japan, it appears, teachers apply a tick where an item is incorrect and, conversely, a "duckegg" when something is right. "This I do not understand," she opined. "In Ireland wrong is always right" - and she giggled her way through the tests marking all the right ones wrong, as she would have it.
Her next task was no less bemusing. Having been prevailed upon to make out the new month's playground-supervision rota, she unerringly completed the task, emblazoning the sheet with striking oriental-style lettering. Never did a series of lost lunchtimes appear so fetchingly posted.
"How do I apply the rota to the walls?" she enquired. I pointed to the blob of old Blu-tack from the previous roster. She looked at me with rising horror. "This is someone's old chewinggum," she intoned with an exaggerated shudder, revealing that Bostick had some way to go towards consolidating their far-east market.
In the staff-room, our manners took on a new civility for what we now call our tea-ceremony. Idioms mastered, she decorously tips the milk into our mugs with the smiling interrogative of say-when. Meanwhile, out in the playground, our boys are in high good order. "Konnichiwa, kakoii," they call to each other, doubling up with laughter at being able to wind one another by saying "Howaya, handsome" in Japanese.
Even the principal has not escaped the new ethic of the east. Ambushed at the gates one morning, as he often is by an anxious parent, he was one minute late reaching his office.
Mizuki promptly marked him late in the timebook, and shook a finger of reproof. No, late is late, she concluded, and there was just no equivocation. Muttering, he walked away, having met his match for the first time in a quarter of a century.
As a breed, we are not always so, but sometimes we are a mite insular. Frequently, the very mention of Euro exchanges, Socrates, Comenius and Leargas causes teachers' eyes to glaze over with indifference. One of the wags on our staff even swears that Leargas is really an acronym for "Loose European Arrangement for Getting Away from School".
But Mizuki has already been a refreshing breeze to us. Mixing thoroughness with humour, and always endeavouring to understand the impenetrable nuances of an Irish school, she evinces affection in all of us, even when she upstages our "Ciunas!" with a throaty, gutteral and fundamentally show-stopping "Shizukani!" Long may the sun rise on our enhanced schoolhouse.
'Til next time, sayonara!
