Oh no you di’int!

I’m not sure what the proper notation is for that neck-swaying, finger-snappin’, attitudinous phrasing of “Oh no you didn’t” that’s so popular these days. Just try to imagine it. Here’s a Christmas Anecdote™ that has nothing to do with Christmas:

I was at one of my elementary schools eating lunch. School lunch here is interesting. It’s either got a big bowl of rice, or about half a baguette as the main calorie source. (Note: The ridiculously oversized bread in school lunch is intimately related to the Japanese myth that all foreigners eat almost nothing but bread.) Beyond that, there’s usually a soup of some sort, maybe a meager salad, maybe some sort of fried, dead animal. And sometimes a dessert item. Oh, and always, always a box of whole milk, which I can’t stand.

This particular day, there was the loaf of bread, some other stuff, and an apple-flavored dessert gelatin. I had trudged halfway through my mile-long tube of bread when I decided I’d like to try a bite of my apple-flavored dessert gelatin. No sooner had I put the spoon in my mouth than the kids around me gasp and start yelling, “OOOOOOHHH! Teacher, he didn’t finish his bread! He has to finish his bread before he eats his apple-flavored dessert gelatin!”

“Little fuckers,” I thought, “I’ll show them.” So I took a big spoonful of apple-flavored dessert gelatin and slurped it loudly and exaggeratedly, moaning in pleasure at the delicious apple flavor. This drew more laughter than shocked gasps.

Then the coup de grâce: I spread some of the apple-flavored dessert gelatin on my unfinished industrial pylon of bread and ate it, again making a big show of how delicious it was. The kids nearly shit themselves. The teacher looked like she was going to explode with laughter. I honestly think I snapped some neurons in their heads.

The point of this story is that elementary school in Japan is less a school and more a programming factory designed to format the brains of little Japanese kids into believing that A) there is one correct way to do everything, B) all alternate methods are evil, and C) anyone not following the correct method must be forced to comply with said method.

Examples I have noticed so far:

Battling with breadsticks

• You must finish your American Gladiators’ battle lance of bread before moving on to dessert.
• You must eat your bread by ripping off one bite’s worth at a time, never dipping it in any soup or foreign flavor substance.
• You must not leave as much as one single grain of rice in your bowl.
• You must not mix any foreign flavor substance, such as leftover curry sauce, into your rice, because doing so is, and I quote, “dirty”.
• You must chew every mouthful of food exactly 30 times. There are posters detailing the numerous (and in my opinion, dubious) benefits of this in every school’s lunchroom.
• You must not talk or sing during cleaning time, regardless of how mindless the task may be.
• You must not walk with your hands in your pockets, no matter how cold it is, because, and I quote, “you might fall and hurt yourself”.
• You must brush your teeth after every meal, even at school, though you need not use toothpaste or floss.

I’m sure I’ll remember some more later. For now, this is FOREIGN HUMANOID UNIT ID #45AX WISHING ALL OTHER HUMANOID UNITS AN ACCEPTABLE WINTER-SYSTEM-SHUTDOWN-AND-CALENDAR-INCREMENT PERIOD.