tempus fugit

My ‘cover’ has been ‘blown’ – as Americans teach one to say – and that twice in the course of the last twenty-four years. In my first summer in Okinawa, a senior colleague thought I might like to accompany him in visiting a high school to observe teaching practice performed by one of our students. I very readily accepted and we arrived, met the principal and vice principal, and generated very productive small talk arising from my colleague’s having himself been a pupil at that very school in that trauma-ridden post-war era.

We then ascended the stairs on our way to the classroom during the five-minute period between lessons. A foreigner was something of a rarity in a school in 1987, and one lively, likely lad called out ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Inspiration for the remark could only have derived from my dark brown beard which might have been as long as an inch. It was not a malicious or vicious, nor yet a xenophobic remark, but derived from the education and humour of which he was possessed.

As for the second occasion, last Saturday evening, I suggested to a friend, a visiting American anthropologist, who has a liking for such things that we might spend an hour at a Japanese-style sauna in Naha. We were almost certainly likely to meet a number of my valued acquaintances to whom I wanted to introduce him. Indeed there were several of the expected friends awaiting the bodily and spiritual benefits to be derived from profuse perspiration. Among those whom I had never seen before were a father, his two small sons who may have been twins or closely born siblings, aged three of four, and his six- or seven-year-old daughter (allowed at that age in the male area). The daughter caught sight of me at close quarters and raised her hand to her mouth to whisper concealingly into her father’s ear, and certainly with a tinge of sparkling-eyed excitement in her countenance. I had no idea exactly what she was saying, but, smilingly and in an exaggerated, amateur dramatic manner, I rehearsed her gesture. In response, she acknowledged me in a happy but slightly confused way - I had, after all, caught her in the act of whispering something she did not want me to hear. We moved on, but later I found the four in a covey in one of the sauna rooms. The father and the daughter were reminded of their earlier perception and this time the word was audible – San-ta-kuraw-zu. She had met Father Christmas off duty, just about in the nude and so certainly in the flesh, and was plainly delighted. My beard is now patchily white, and though only about three or four millimetres long it definitely identified me as the one who takes on late December moonlighting duties.