It seems that the teacher postings for the new school year are finally out. Japan has a rather unique system of allocating teachers to schools. Teachers work for a prefectural board of education, which can send them anywhere within the prefecture. They do this seemingly completely at random, so teachers never know when they will be moving or where they will be going. This time around, Ako SHS is losing a lot of great teachers, and perhaps worst of all, they are almost all teachers that I know and like. Amongst others, we are losing Watanabe-sensei, Tajiri-sensei, Ishino-sensei, Okuto-sensei, Kotani-sensei, Igaki-sensei, Kono-sensei, Kuroda-sensei and Seiki-sensei.

I never really got to know some of these teachers very well, like Watanabe-sensei, Tajiri-sensei and Kono-sensei. This was mainly because of the language barrier, but despite that, I spent quite a bit of time sitting with them in ichi-nensai and they became friendly faces to me. We chatted a little bit now and then too. Although I don't expect Tajiri-sensei, who was my neighbour, will miss the sounds of gunfire coming from my apartment at 10pm at night though, hehe.

Some of the others I knew quite well, like Okuto-sensei and Kotani-sensei. They were two of my favourite teachers. I'd just started to get to know Kotani-sensei a little better, and I was always grateful to him for teaching me useful Japanese words and manners. Okuto-sensei was my OC class partner, so I'm really sad to see him go.

And I guess I'm pretty disappointed about the fact I never got to know some of the senseis that I thought were interesting people. Ishino-sensei and Kuroda-sensei, for example. I never really got to know Ishino-sensei, despite the fact she speaks fairly good English. She was very hard to approach because she seemed so nervous all the time. I did manage to suggest a few times that we hang out like I did with some of the other teachers, and never got a negative response, but she never initiated anything either. Perhaps I just needed to take more initiative, hehe. Kuroda-sensei is pretty much the same story, although he can't speak English, hehe. He's a kendo master (7th dan) instead. Such is life, though, I suppose. You can't win 'em all, or perhaps more accurately, you can't get to know 'em all.

So yes, it's kind of sad to see these people go. Looking on the bright side, though, there are still some great teachers still here and a whole lot of new ones will be coming in. Which is exciting. I was told that one of them is 'young', but that actually meant that she's mid 30s, hehe. I suppose everything is relative to the speaker, hehe. Thanks, Yoshida-sensei, I really had my hopes up of meeting someone my own age there :P Still, I am looking forward to meeting all the new teachers. Regardless of age, in my limited experience the teachers tend to be pretty cool people. And the way I see it, they're on my turf now, instead of the other way around, so hopefully I can leverage that to my advantage :)