It really doesn't matter. REALLY

Yesterday when I went up to the classroom to supervise cleaning one of the girls was standing on a chair jumping up and down trying to reach the cord for the blinds that had been wound up all the way to the top of the window - the blind was now all the way down. I left the blind 3/4 way down because the cord wasn't long enough to reach without a ladder if you let it all the way down. She comes in - sees that one blind is higher than the others and just has to fix this "problem" and in doing so made a whole bunch of problems for herself. Why didn't she stop and think that maybe there was a reason for the blind being left as it was? All she had on her mind was making sure that everything was tidy and even - an unfortunately highly prevelant preoccupation over here. I made her get the ladder and fix it so it was no huge issue for me - but just another example of how everything here has to be just perfect.

Another example is the school lunch trays in the staffroom. In this school for some reason I have to come to the staffroom and get my lunch from here and then take it to the particular classroom I am eating in that week. The teachers who eat in the staffroom are the vice principal, science teacher, music teacher, librarian, nurse and the office ladies. These are mostly older ladies and they seem to get a real kick out of arranging the plates on the trays. If I am doing it I just put the bowls on the trays, as long as each tray has a bowl of each item it doesn't matter about order - but then Ouchi or Kawata will come along and rearrange it all so that all the salad bowls are in the same place - and not just in the same place but in the designated "salad area" on the tray. It is really quite amazing to watch how they simply are incapable of just letting it go. If they see a bowl that's out of order they practically dive at it to push it into place and are all tut tutting under their breath.

And even more hilarious than that, is the way they dish the food out. The food comes in metal buckets and we divide it ourselves - they have made a science out of it. God forbid that I should get one more grain of rice than Mori sensei! There's one lady in particular who I always try to beat to doing the rice cos if she does it she will actually spend 10 minutes over it, checking and double checking that every bowl has the same amount while we all just stand there watching her as though this is a perfectly normal thing to do. And she's not even DOING anything - she just goes along and kind of pats the rice on the head with the rice scoop and murmurs under her breath, moves to the next bowl, maybe picks up a clump from that bowl and shakes it into the next bowl. Really, 10 rice grains is not gonna make anyone cry.

You know how when you are little having the same amount of ice cream as your siblings was REALLY important, but as you grow up you don't care that much anymore? I think the Japanese are going the ohter way. When they are little they care about the differences, but they don't lose that paranoia when they grow up, it's kind of cultivated by the obsession with fairness in class. In class when they are decided who will go first in a game they not only decide the first person and just clockwise from there, they decide the order of everyone! That's why it takes so long to get them organised into playing games cos they spend 5 minutes doing janken to decide order. Sometimes I just come in with my eenymeenyminymo and then tell them clockwise and it leaves them all beweildered.