Camp in the Land of the Rising Sun
Camp has a mythical status in American culture that is largely absent in the UK. And yet, growing up, I felt familiar with it. One of the quirks about living in modernity is pop culture’s capacity to make you feel sentimental for experiences you’ve never had. When I listened to episodes from This American Life, a podcast favourite, and watched Wet Hot American Summer, the popular Netflix series, they elicited the whimsical nostalgia of summer camp experiences from another life. Perhaps I owned a baseball mitt in this life, drank vanilla floats, went to prom.
Recently an American acquaintance referred to a close friend as my summer camp friend. The prefix seemed to emphasise the special nature of that friendship, forged in the mystical cult atmosphere of camp, to the exclusion of other relationships. Although I felt like I knew about camp, I didn’t really know what camp was. As host Ira Glass says in his introduction to 1998 TAL episode Notes on Camp, “There is just a gap between camp people and non-camp people.” I wasn’t a camp person. That is, until last month, when I crossed this ontological threshold and arrived, at the age of 28, at my very first summer camp.
Just after noon on a humid Sunday in mid-August, 180 high school kids poured into a wooded, cabined area in the mountains near Yufuin. They arrived in big busses that chugged up the mountain roads. My own K-car struggled valiantly with the climb, polluting the serenity of the forest with its spluttering ascent. Upon finally getting to the camp I felt like Don Quixote dismounting from his faithful steed. I had a fleeting urge to feed my Suzuki Wagon a carrot.
As I stepped out of my overheated vehicle I considered, with no small trepidation, that this was my first camp. Of course, I was there not as a kid but as one of the instructors. I would be the one laying the ground for all of these experiences I’d heard about, for better or for worse. And we were not in America, or even the UK, but in Japan. This was also a camp that was somewhat different from the impressions I’d formed courtesy of TV, with the focus here being on language study.
In Japan, fun comes with regimented learning. High school English camps are run in the summer holidays, broken into camps for elementary, middle and high school students. The school summer holiday in Oita is five weeks long, but don’t let the name fool you: students are still expected to go to school, do extracurricular activities and, in this case, go on an academic trip to the woods. What could sound better?
16 and 17-year-olds arrived from schools across Oita prefecture. In addition to the students there were roughly 30 ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers), of which I was one, along with a dozen Japanese teachers. Most of the ALTs had organised this summer camp in previous years, and arrived well schooled in the protocol of camp. As I walked into the main camp entrance I was met by ALTs wearing fancy dress, holding clipboards and barking orders. They greeted me like every student passing through, emanating a sense of secure purpose. I was blindsided by the face paint, and felt fresh off the boat.
Just like the students I had to sign in, ticking the box on the form that read Group Leader, my role for the next 48 hours. I introduced myself to the other gaijin organisers, many of whom hailed from Oita City (Oita Prefecture’s main city) and were thus unknown. At least a couple mistook me for a first year ALT. I wondered if Nakatsu, in reality fairly田舎 (translation: yokel countryside), was the Shadow Land to the people from the big city. If I wasn’t quite a cackling hyena from The Lion King, perhaps I was a member of the Night’s Watch: uncouth, emanating a strange odour and full of bitter tales of deprivation in the wilderness. Outside of Nakatsu I hadn’t had the chance to make connections with many people on the JET Programme. Underneath a perhaps somewhat arch veneer I was faced with the same questions any newbie camper has: will I find my people here? Will anyone like me?
Expressions of mild bemusement morphed into voiceless terror when I met my assigned group of high school students. I was given the task of “leading” a group of ten kids through activities for the next two days, helping them generate memories to sustain them later in life, on dark nights of the soul. One of the rules of the camp was that students were to speak “英語だけ” (“English only”) during their time in the Yufu hills. Understandably, most of my group’s students were mortified by this prospect. I was tempted to ask them the Japanese for “prison”, but decided against it. I plunged into the pit with effusive greetings, but my introductory lounge patter was met with monosyllabic minimalism.
“What’s your favourite food?”
“…”
“What sports do you like?”
“…”
“Do you like AKB48?”
“…”
“How many plates of sushi can you eat at Sushi Ro [a local conveyer belt sushi chain]?”
“…”
“What’s your name…?”
…
I work at elementary schools, and when I ask these questions at lunchtime students enthusiastically respond, eager to talk my ear off in unintelligible dialect. Witnessing a Japanese six-year-old proselytizing about their favourite YouTuber (who you’ve never heard of), while simultaneously teaching you, the poor gaijin savage, how to correctly use chopsticks and open the small milk carton, all the time contending with a huge ball of rice glued to the roof of their mouth, grains propelling through the air as they chew and chat, never fails to amuse. Teenagers are a different matter. Forging a connection takes time.
Time, however, was at a premium. We had less than 48 hours to have the best freaking times of our lives. The halting getting-to-know-you was brief, and we were thrust straight into the classic Japanese tradition of the opening ceremony, where every man and his dog has to go on stage and take up ten seconds of oxygen going through introductory formalities. Once this was over the camp began in earnest.
I’d been given a pink booklet containing all the necessary information. Its cover contained a large illustration of a Star Wars character, and my eyes fell on large font that read, “GOAL: TO DEFEAT DARTH WASEIGO!” I had wondered why, when signing up for the camp online, I’d been asked to choose a light saber colour. It now made sense. More Star Wars related nerd-isms leapt from the pages as I leafed through. There was a theme to this camp: last year’s theme was Pokemon, this year it was Star Wars. I shuddered a little. The first three Star Wars films were the highlight of my childhood. If only George Lucas had stopped at three. I wondered how many Japanese teenagers were going to be familiar with obscure Star Wars lexicon such as ciphers, Coruscant and Queen Neeyutnee.
In keeping with all of this, the Camp Tutors (above the Group Leaders in the camp hierarchy) had given themselves Star Wars themed backstories and character names. Jared from New Zealand was listed in the booklet as Rand Ko, originating from the sand dunes of Tattooine. I tried to keep my cynicism at bay. The 180 students were to be split into four large groups denoted by colour, and within each colour group there were four smaller teams, with each team made up of 10–12 students. I was to be the group leader for Blue Team 4.
Sports, drama, art and a scavenger hunt: these were the basis for the main four activities. In each of these activities teams were awarded points based on their performance, with extra points and MVP awards up for grabs for displays of English excellence and leadership. At the end of the two days the points collected by every team would be totaled, and a winner selected from one of the blue, yellow, green and purple teams.
While trying to maintain an ironic distance and avoid all hints of tyrannical leadership, once I found out it was a competition I couldn’t help but want to do well. My team, the poetically named Blue Team 4, raced through the activities, with breaks for diary writing, team meetings and meals along the way. Faced with students’ understandable tiredness, I felt at times like a sheepherder, at others like my Dad. Childhood feels like light years ago, and yet on occasion the lingering proximity of early years will become apparent in the form of automatic responses — derivative, decidedly uncool reactions — to situations that call upon myself to be THE AUTHORITY FIGURE. In these scenarios history repeats itself as I re-enact parental moves from yesteryear. During the camp I felt this most keenly when attempting to motivate the kids on my team. The goal was Tony Robbins, but the effect at times more like Ricky Gervais in The Office (or Steve Carrell, for you Americans out there).
The days were long, with the wake-up announcement blasting at 6.30 am and ALTs finishing up both nights at close to midnight. Heat exhaustion was a constant threat. At night, in rooms like ovens, sleep was hard to come by, with few people subsiding on more than a few hours a night.
The most difficult thing about the heat in Kyushu around this time of year is not the temperature, which hovers in the mid-to-low 30s Celsius, but the humidity. The humidity invades every space, every corner and crack. In western countries, being out of the sun significantly increases comfort levels, but here in southern Japan, unless you possess the modern miracle of air conditioning, escape is futile. All there is to do is embrace the sweat, and perhaps purchase a damp towel to wrap around your neck and under your shirt. This heat hack is particularly effective, although it took some time getting used to the sight of men walking about covered in small towels. Women’s response to the threat of the sun is to wear gloves that reach up past their elbows. They complete this fashion statement with full-face masks and wide brimmed hats. If their preternaturally youthful visages are anything to go by, Japanese women are on to something.
Back in the camp, the mixture of humidity and sleep deprivation induced a sort of mass delirium that found its greatest expression on a final day of bonding, dancing and obscure Star Wars themed skits. In spite of the tiredness, Blue Team 4 started to open up.
I had a long conversation with one of only two boys in our group, Kenshiro. He had been extremely reticent, often staring blankly at me when faced with a question, only smiling when talking in Japanese to the other boy in the group. He brightened up though when the subject of tennis came up. We discovered that we shared the same tennis coach, and he started cracking up when I asked him about our coach’s pedagogical quirks. Koza-san is a wiry, infectiously energetic 70-year-old with a penchant for Roger Federer and a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. He is an excellent teacher, despite neither of us sharing a language that we can speak well. He loves nothing more though than to pause a lesson, sometimes with several other people waiting, and take up to 10 mins effusively explaining to a student what they did wrong, while everyone else watches on awkwardly. The coach’s long explanatory digressions were, it turns out, just as tiring for Kenshiro as they were for me.
I started to get a sense of my group’s personalities. This is not always easy when you teach dozens of classes across three schools. Interacting with high schoolers, dialogue could move past the questions about favourite colours that normally mark the limit of elementary and even middle school student interactions.
I also got to know other ALTs. Many ALTs are American, but I met others from places as far flung as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Trinidad and Jamaica.
One ALT’s story stood out. He was half-American, half-Japanese, but had lived a life that veered from the routine. Over several smoking breaks at the edge of the forest, Adrian told me about his upbringing: he’d been born in Japan to a Japanese mother and American father, but after his parents divorced when he was six, he left with his mother for Brazil. She was one of the many Nikkei-jin, the ethnic Japanese that lived in Brazil. He was enrolled in school there with not a word of Portuguese, and lived in Brazil until he was 18. Then, after finishing high school, he decided to move to Hawaii and reconnect with his estranged father. Having become fluent in Portuguese, he now had to learn another language from scratch, this time English. He did this in six years, working and going to university in Hawaii. Now 24, he had the enjoyable habit of labelling everything less than positive with the adjective of “trash,” a word he would stretch out to a luxurious, derisive drawl. Whenever there was a rustle in the trees he would stop his story, asking me if I could see any students — or teachers — that might catch us smoking in the dark. In those moments I felt very young.
Not accepted in Brazil or Hawaii, Adrian decided last year to apply for the JET Programme in the hope of rediscovering his Japanese heritage and, finally, feeling at home. This month he arrived in Japan. There were not many words left in his memory of the Japanese he’d spoken until the age of six, but he had already told me the useful term for the traditional Japanese squat toilet. He also put me on to his discovery of the 100 yen portable cigarette dispensing pouch purchasable from conbinis. Something told me that he would do fine in Japan.
On the last night of camp a disco was organised for the students. Perhaps it was the exhaustion, perhaps it was the heat, but towards the end of the day a febrile atmosphere rose. At the finale of the day’s last assembly, without warning, the main lights in the auditorium shut off. Taylor Swift erupted from the speaker system and the mass of teenagers exploded into hormonal hysteria. Glow sticks emerged from somewhere, students waving them frantically. Fairy lights of various colours illuminated the dance floor, the middle of which opened up for various students to start breakdancing. Each new song was greeted by roars, each new dance move in the middle by screams. Japanese teachers lined the walls to the side of the entrance, watching on.
I was struck by two observations. The first was a sense of the enduring power of music to bring people together, whether in the UK, Japan or anywhere else. Especially teenagers at a disco. Live music is not widely available in Oita, and it is one of the things that I occasionally miss about life in the UK. The second observation was that I had possibly not felt this old before, bobbing slowly at the back of the crowd, chaperoning a teenage disco. In the space of just a few hours I had been made to feel both youthful and geriatric, and the thread tying it all together was this: I felt vital. And camp was the cause of it.
The next morning a final assembly was held. The group winners were announced (the Blue Team came second), and individual awards were given out. One of my students, Maki, won the MVP prize out of 50 students for her contribution to the camp. In keeping with some of the Dad vibes I’d been having, I felt a balloon of pride grow in my chest as she took the stage to receive the award.
Just before the students boarded the busses taking them home, they were finally allowed to retrieve their phones and take photographs with new friends and ALTs. 30 minutes later my cheeks ached from at least a hundred selfies. My tired face is now immortalised in selfies of me with bunny ears, whiskers, Bambi freckles and Hollywood teeth. Apparently かわいい-free, filter-less selfies aren’t allowed if you are a girl in high school in Japan. Soon the picture taking was over and the goodbyes to ALTs and students complete. Not one for prolonging goodbyes, I made a quick exit. As I got into my stuffy car, I already felt melancholic for the experiences of the past two days. I’d been infected by the sappiness of it all. I’d caught the bug. I was now a camp person.
