Fear the Lipton Peach Tea Gang. The band of surly 13-year-old girls
decked out in short skirts and hoodies embossed with the Playboy bunny
logo are a force of nature. The bottles of tea they carry are actually
sticky grenades, hurled at the least provocation. They have no respect
for authority and they are the perfect spiritual center for Bob
Gaulke’s Embrace Your Insignificance.
For two and a half years Gaulke worked with a revolving cast of
bored, disenfranchised, and overworked Japanese adolescents, trying
(mostly in vain) to teach them basic English. He was punched in the
testicles more than once for his efforts. Using short, sushi-sized
passages, Embrace Your Insignificance deftly chronicles those
nut punches and the smiling children who administered them.
Though Gaulke is ostensibly the hero of the book—many passages
chronicle his lust for colleagues, frustrations with communication, and
the foibles of culture shock—it’s the children that make the book
so charming. This is less a travelogue than a sociological study of
Japanese primary education and the kids that endure it.
Gaulke is fascinated with the student population known as “Yankees”
(as in, “Yankee go home”), who are doomed to unskilled labor by the age
of 16. Unlike America, education is not mandatory in Japan, and many
children simply hang around the school to be close to friends. Gaulke
renders their lives with a careful outsider’s eye in passages that are
funny, sometimes beautiful, and often moving.
But Embrace Your Insignificance is fascinating beyond its
preoccupation with Japanese youth culture. Gaulke also drifts through
subjects as diverse as food, weather, Japanese social standards, and
isolation, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes Gaulke’s short
entries feel stilted and repetitive, as if he’s trying too hard to be
the deep artistic wanderer. He’s at his best in unadorned prose, as in
one passage called “Badminton Lake” in which he expounds on the
graceful dance of a girls’ badminton class as they drill in a grungy
gymnasium.
In the end, his account of Yokohama reads the way I imagine teaching
English there for two years must have felt: sometimes exhilarating,
sometimes funny, and sometimes beautiful. Even despite a small amount
of monotony and frustration, it’s worth the trip.