What is a Japanese School Staff Room Like?

Seven Places in Japan

UPDATE: 23/10/24.

I never got on to writing the rest of these but now I am back in the UK and err self-employed. I think I will. I trying to read as much as I can in English about onsens so hopefully it’ll be a well-informed post.

Japanese Places Series

I have been thinking of doing a place-based series of blogs for a while and this is the first of (what I hope is) seven blogs. They will be:

1. Staff room

2. Onsen

3. Classroom

4. Convenience store

5. Park

6. Mountain

7. Train

I came up with seven as I am leaving Japan for a month in seven days, but it turns out that each one will take a little bit of time. I might shift the order around a bit as honestly I don’t know how interesting No.4 will be.

So here’s more than you ever wanted to know about Japanese staff rooms. Sorry about the footnotes.

Word

The Japanese word for staff room is 職員室¹ (shokuinshitsu). This breaks down into ‘shoku’ meaning ‘role’, ‘in’ meaning person and ‘shitsu’ being a suffix to describe a room within an institution. Shoku originally meant weaving and is seen as the Ur-skilled job I guess but has since expanded to mean any profession. On the last component, think of it as the way some universities describe a computer room as a computer ‘suite’ or ‘lab’. The purpose of this suffix is to denote that this room is special somehow².

The Kanji shitsu began life as the above minus the 1,2,3 elements which just meant room. The 1,2,3 elements denote specificity or targetedness. Supposedly the character looks like a house, but I don’t quite see it.

The people

The room where I spend more time than I sleep.

From a look at Google Images and conversations with others, my staff room is fairly typical. It contains about three-dozen people seated at individual desks, arranged in a ‘U’ formation (See above). The bulk of the room consists of Japanese teachers who teach a range of subjects. There are six Japanese Teachers of English (JTEs) in the room. There is a separate, smaller staff room for teachers of older students. At the transom of the ‘U’ are the two vice principals, known as Kyōtō senseis ((教頭先生).³ ⁴. Stationed adjacently between teachers and their seniors are the administration staff. They schedule when classes happen, plan exam marking and write stuff on whiteboards around the room. I sit at the north end of the staff room near the window.

The space

There are four annex rooms but I’ve only labelled two for brevity⁵. Apart from the gym, I believe this is the biggest room in the school. The carpet is a timeless blue marl, with a grey pattern rectangular pattern every ten feet or so. Each desk contains a bookcase which is about a meter long and 50 centimeters high and is placed landscape across each desk. Mine contains a number of Japanese books, blank CDs and props for classes. As with much in Japan, they are designed for someone slightly shorter than myself. I have fantasised about removing the shelf so I didn’t bang my knee as frequently as I do. The median desk contains slightly more stuff and is more personalised than mine. The photo below is fairly representative:

The lighting is your typical airport security office strobe, with little expense spared on air-conditioning. In summer it holds steady at about 25 degrees, with it being upped to 27 in these cooler months. There is a good deal of natural light, though I am lucky in this regard, being nearer the window as I am.

Most desks have a little stool next to them which students perch on during their five-minute meetings with teachers. Despite a) not being a teacher and b) not being around during lunchtime almost ever, a stool appeared next to my desk a couple of months ago. It’s an opal white, faux leather thing and I am honestly quite proud of it.

The kitchen area is about the size of two merged broom cupboards. There is a well-used coffee machine in the back-left corner and the kitchen has the alkaline smell of sour coffee. I strongly doubt the machine has been cleaned in years. There is a very strong microwave and samovar of hot water which almost all staff will use at some point in the day.

At around 1210 the entire staffroom takes on the aroma of atomised spice mix as pot noodles are made and eaten before students arrive for lunchtime consultations.

The copy room is a somewhat liminal space where dawdling is discouraged by the lack of stool upon which one can perch. There is a large table where one can use a paper cutter, industrial stapler and other such tools. There is a laminator but it is located in the staff room at the Western wall.

The atmosphere

Scholarly. It is very quiet during class times as around 40% of the teachers are absent and teaching and the remainder tend to silently work at their computers on marking, lesson preparation or writing wordy blogs. Teachers do talk but only in discreet and task-oriented sallies that seem to have an implied time limit of around three minutes. Only two or three teachers would deign to speak to me and it is almost always a question of arcane English grammar. As such noise pollution and distraction is quite low for me. I like this. It has the feeling of a feeling of a first-class train carriage. It would honestly be the optimal environment in which to watch a Werner Herzog movie or a video essay about Christopher Nolan.

However, this being Japan, the bureaucracy does come knocking occasionally. There is a direct, always-on intercom between the kocho-shitsu (e.g. the headteachers office) and the staff room. Every hour or so a loud voice will say “%senseiName desuka?”, a teacher will jog to the intercom and say “moshi moshi”⁶⁷and some request for paperwork will be made. As the office don’t speak much English I am never requested over the intercom, but occasionally emissaries do arrive at my desk seeking paperwork and my personal seal⁸ .

I learnt recently that one of the fathers of psychological behaviourism John Watson was fired from Johns Hopkins University for having an affair, started working as an ad-man for a coffee company and is credited with coining the term “coffee break”.⁹ The concept hasn’t quite made it over the Pacific as coffee is treated more like nitrogen-fuel injector fluid in suped-up cars with teachers scarfing it down before they march off to class to fire nuggets of information at children at the rate of a tommy-gun on automatic speed. Myself and another teacher have the occasional tea time where we drink Yorkshire Tea and talk for half an hour. From the amount that he enjoys it and the rarity of the occasion, I can tell that it is a most rare indulgence.¹⁰

Manchester United’s Stadium has the nickname, “The Theatre of Dreams”¹¹ with the implication being that stuff that people dream of happens there e.g. winning games, being a respected person etc. One might think that to the average English language assistant, the staff room might be thought of a similar place. Indeed, back home, typically one would want to get promoted within a workplace. This is not the case here.

A recent Reddit thread on my employers sub reddit asked how one might become a full-time teacher of English and the top responses were a) “you can’t” and ) “look around you, you fool why would you want to?”. The main reason for all the doom and gloom about being a teacher is the hours. From what I can tell from official documents the official hours for a normal full-time teacher are 0815 to 1645, however, I have seen teachers regularly stay past 1900 and arrive at 0700. I once forgot my official seal at work and returned at 2000 on a Friday to find the staffroom about as full when I left it at 1615.

Talk of sleeping teachers is much exaggerated though. The old timers occasionally take a nap and the P.E. teachers occasionally do the arms-crossed-shoulder-lean but this is quite rare in my experience. You do hear the pneumatic rhythm of a dozing teacher, but honestly, it’s the exception that proves the rule.

It seems funny to say but money changes hands quite a lot in the workplace. Firstly, there’s a social events fund which is about ¥4000 a month. Secondly, money is separately collected for births, birthdays and I presume deaths. Thirdly, club activities often have a fee¹² . Fourthly, there is a coffee fund with two funding mechanisms, a one-off per-use fee (¥50) or an all-you-can-drink monthly subscription (¥1000). That is to say broadly, much that is subsidised by the school or employer in the UK is explicitly paid for in Japan. To play the armchair anthropologist, I would suggest this to avoid accidentally falling into the moral debt of a colleague and the subsequent implied need to repay them for it.

On the other hand, gift-giving is huge in the workplace. I have received about a half-dozen edible gifts and I am not the most well socially connected worker there ever was. Today, like the 27th November today, I received a small stockings worth of individually wrapped food stuffs. These gifts always have a regional feel and are based on where the giver has just been. One of the saddest pieces of advice I received from an American colleague was never to say you’ve been anywhere on holiday to a teacher as they will expect a gift.¹³

People

From an alien, birdseye perspective, the hierarchy of the office is clear. The vice principals are seated in what Feng Shui practitioners call the power position of the room. That is their back is to a wall and they are facing out to the room such that they can see it all. Indeed, one gets the sense that they ‘rule the roost’ so to speak. If one wishes to leave during their scheduled hours for anything longer than a piss break, one must submit to them a form asking for permission to do so¹⁴. They are, however, benign monarchs and rarely use their de jure power to enforce anything beyond basic attendance and the tracking thereof.

The administration staff conspire to create the schedule on a 10 day lag every week. They seem like bright, untroubled people and it seems like quite a nice gig. I once requested to move a bunch of lessons and they ignored me which in retrospect was probably wise.¹⁵

The teachers are a diverse group, age-wise. The median age is probably about 28, but the average will be in 40s as there are a number of teachers making themselves comfortable in their 60s.

A completely bizarre mechanic of the school system in Japan is that every April¹⁶ any teacher can be transferred to a different school. This is done with about two months notice and leads to one of the dictums of my job which is “Don’t form close relationships with your teachers as your favourite might leave in April”.¹⁷ Indeed, several of the best teachers are said to have stayed longer than usual (five years) and hence they fear being moved soon. Older teachers seem immune from this transfer system for what I presume are compassionate reasons. My favourite teacher is approaching his seventies and is wonderful.

One can order a lunch be delivered to be your desk for ¥370 (1.97GBP). To order it you queue up with the students making similar orders. You have to do it before 1100 or you are stuffed. I believe I have had about six or seven of these since arriving and 80% of the time it is either beef or pork slices with rice in a soy-based sauce. The women who prepare and deliver it are delightful though.

Students

I have talked about the form of the room but what is its function? To help students, ultimately. So how does that happen in the staff room?

As with many things in Japan, there is a script to be followed. If a student wishes to enter the staffroom they must enter the room via one of two sliding doors, speak loudly enough to hear but not so loud that they can’t be ignored and say“%lastName Sensei I am here for %reason”, and they must not make eye contact with that teacher even if they are within their line of sight. After a respectful¹⁸ delay the teacher will respond gruffly “Hai” and the student will sidle over for a tete-a-tete. Having the linguistic sophistication of a two-year-old, I don’t always follow what is discussed. However, I can tell the emotional range is from dry academic seminars to full-on crying¹⁹. The latter isn’t at all rare, as surprisingly maybe, public displays of emotion aren’t all that uncommon in Japan.

Twice a week a random selection of students come into the staff room to hoover. I always feel bad about this as it seems to be a kind of feudal, unhappy dynamic. More generally speaking though, students clean the school as a whole a couple of times of week. It is kind of an after-school mass cleaning party, works very well and seems honestly quite fun.

Conclusion

I neither dislike nor like the staff room. It is as David Foster Wallace described fish as to water. Some autobiographical detail might shed a final chink of light on this place. I wrote this piece from about 0830 to 1600 on a typical Monday morning. No one bothered me or asked me what I was doing. It is exam season you see and I have no classes. I imagine back in the UK, I’d have been given some makework, but everyone seems content to gently buzz around even though there is very little work to do. A teacher asked me about the sentence ‘It was not until before the 1900s that automobiles became common’ and why it didn’t make sense. Apart from that, this is what I did. Until next time.

1. For those who have gone through life only encountering languages where the written language provides clues as to the pronunciation, I shall give you a summary of how Japanese works. Fundamentally, it breaks down four ways. The complex characters you see here (職員室) are kanji and this is how the word is spelt in Japanese at the base level. There is no alphabet of Kanji and instead, each part of the word is a unique glyph (e.g. symbol) and must be learnt by heart. The next level is hirigana which is essentially the same as phonics in English. Japanese people know that 職員室 sounds like shokuinshitsu because they would have been taught the phonics to it a long time ago. The phonics are しょくいんしつ and these are characters from the Japanese alphabet. However, hiragana doesn’t map onto Kanji and so knowing the kanji of one word doesn’t give a clue as to the pronunciation of another word with similar characters. This is unlike European languages where knowing the spelling and pronunciation of ‘cap’ will give the reader a clue of how to pronounce ‘map’. The inverse is true in Japanese, ‘flower’ in Japanese is pronounced ‘hana’ and spelt 花, yet ‘nose’ is written as 鼻 and pronounced as ‘hana’.

Obviously every written language is essentially a collection of symbols and their relation to spoken speech is very much debatable, but the history of Japanese explains some of its unique difficulty. They essentially had an indigenous language (which is where the pronounciations of stuff came from), but imported a written language from China between 50AD and 500AD. There was then a gradual process of linking the indigenous words to the Chinese characters but this was a lossy process and hence Japanese and Chinese people write water as 水 but the former pronounce it as Mizu (みず) whereas the latter pronounce it as Shui.

There is an active and long-running debate about the efficiency of the Japanese written language that has had a number of sensical and non-sensical proposals over the years: decreasing the number of kanji’s to 1,962 in 1922; decreasing it again in 1946 with the intention of abandoning it altogether; increasing it to 1,945 in 1981 and again in 2,136 in 2010. Kanji is also used to write names which gets very confusing so there was a successful proposal to limit the use of newborn’s names to a pre-approved list (1948), but a TV show made or asked(?) a parent to register their child using the kanji for ‘rubber’, taking it to court (2002-2003), the government responded by expanding the list, then reducing the size of the expansion due to public feedback disliking that the kanji for 'dung,” “corpse,” “cancer,” “evil,” “piles,” and “mistress” were included. This was a re-run of as a similar debate in the 1990’s where a father in Tokyo named his son Akuma meaning “devil”.

Indeed, there is an intergenerational debate about whether Kanji characters should have any phonic meaning at all. The old guard says no, kanji signifies no phonic meaning at all, whereas younger people like to edit their kanji name to include additional sounds or visual elements. The old guard can be characterised as the Kanji as Word team whereas the new guard can be characterised as the Kanji as Art team. The following quote puts it well “Specialists are alarmed that the younger generations don’t care much for the innate meanings carried by the kanji characters, placing more value on the audio and visual aspects.”

Indeed there has been more debate over the use of Japanese since the Edo period (beginning in 1603) with Poet-Philogist Kamo no Mabuchi saying that French dictionaries are only composed of 50 symbols and Dutch ones only consisting of 25. Indeed, The fact that Harry Potter en de Orde van de Feniks is only 688 pages long in Dutch and that the Japanese version is split across two volumes and is 1362 pages long should tell you a lot.

2. Unlike in English, individual characters have vibes. The pairing of characters to match the vibe of a thing is a big thing in Asian cultures. Take this sign in Taiwan. The Spanish Mi Casa has been translated into 米卡莎 which pronounced “Mǐ kǎshā. There is a syllable in Taiwanase that is closer to the ‘sa’ in ‘casa’ but ‘sha’ is more often used in place names hence Mǐ kǎshā is preferred to Mǐ kǎsā because the individual characters can maintain their vibe.

3. Annoyingly, Kyōtō-sensei has nothing to do with Kyoto the place. “Kyo” means teaching and “to” means leader. Elementary Japanese learners will know that Kyo also means “today” and “to” also means “and”, but hey that’s life.

4. On all these dumb little translations, as some might consider them. There is a habit of Anglo transplants to Japan to get sort of a philia for discovering Japanese words for previously undescribed concepts or nouns and going around saying them all the time. This ranges from the harmless e.g. saying Kanpai instead of cheers, calling a special type of table with a built-in heater a Kotatsu, to the downright annoying calling a beer a bieru, saying onegaishimasu / itidakimasu instead of Let’s Eat, or doing an impression of local fishmonger when one says ‘sunnimasssssen’. This kind of faux-local “I am so fluent I instinctually use Japanese idioms because I am just so on the path to fluency and integration” just really pinches my shoes.

5. Were I to label them they would be an additional copy room at the Western wall and a room whose purpose I haven’t divined in the Eastern wall. Neither is remarkable in any way.

6. This is the typical phrase used when someone picks up the phone. In English I can only think of the phrase ‘allo’ people sometimes say when they pick up the phone, but this itself obviously comes from French and I learn is also used in German, Arabic and Russian.

7. I also learnt that one of the inventors of the telephone, Alexander Bell, tried to make ‘Ahoy-hoy’ the standard greeting on the telephone instead of “hello”. The Wikipedia article doesn’t speculate as to why he thought this but I have a reason. The standard response to the greeting ‘Hello’ is symmetrical e.g. the correct response to hello is ‘hello’. Compare this with “ahoy-hoy” which has a non-symmetrical response with ‘aye aye’, ‘no no’ or ‘flag’ being appropriate responses in a maritime context. In the context of early telephones, there would have been reliability issues and hence lots of people saying ‘Hello’, ‘Hello’, ‘Can you hear me, hello’. etc., whereas in the parallel universe where Bell’s ‘Ahoy-hoy’ was the popular phone greeting this confusion would be avoided. If Speaker A said ‘A-hoy hoy’ and didn’t hear back ‘aye aye’ from speaker B they would know their call hadn’t connected and they would call back. The crux of it is Hello is both a greeting, and the correct response to a greeting whereas Bell’s formulation has it properly that the greeting and the response to the greeting are distinct. If only.

8. A subject for another day but in Japan you don’t tend to sign stuff, but stamp it with a personalised seal called a Hanko. I have one but it really just says Dominic so anyone with the same first name could also stamp on my behalf. This might seem insecure but to be honest, so is signing your name in cursive so He Without Sin etc.

9. Chapter 4 (I think! the one after Freud) of The Story of the Human Mind by Paul Bloom. I also read about a British student who was studying the impact of short breaks on worker’s productivity in 1902 and got the Home Secretary to send him to a weapons factory. One can see the Daily Mail headline: “Leftie Oxbridge Wonk imposes MARTIAL LAW for his loony scheme to prevent OUR BOYS from winning the next war”. Anyway, the full story is “When Kent was sent by the Home Secretary to stop wartime munitions production as a trial to test the effect of a tea break on productivity, the factory manager refused on the grounds that he had a production schedule within which he must comply. Meeting this challenge, Kent showed the letter from the Home Secretary and observed that if necessary he would have the police called to arrest the manager who blocked the Home Office directive.”

10. One of the tragedies of my time in the Civil Service is a never worked with Civil Servants in person. From what I am told, all Civil Servants used to do was natter about the direction of the state over tea and biscuits.

11. When Manchester United used to lose, commentators who were feeling snippy might say “The Theatre of Dreams has become the Theatre of Nightmares“, but since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013 and the subsequent decline in the team’s performances the nickname has become much less prominent.

12. I recently collected ¥13000 from students and staff for an event I arranged.

13. Quick anecdote. I attended a club meeting in late October. A welcoming committee of three students approached me and said ‘Dominic Sensei we want sweets because it’s Halloween’. Me, knowing I hadn’t got any, and indeed that I was going away for a week afterwards and hence would miss Halloween, was quite panicked by this. Instead of being disliked, I promised that I had simply left them at home, and texted my girlfriend so that she could drive, get some and come to school to give them to the children. In the UK I think the student’s behaviour would be seen as bratty, but my interpretation is that the children correctly perceived that I was unaware of what they would call my 義務 (gimu) or obligations and were simply helping a dumb foreigner.

14. In actuality, I don’t do this as I value my sanity more than following my deontological duty as a signer of a contract saying I would do this. As of yet there have been no negative consequences.

15. I am sure like Atlas they hold the world up on their shoulders but sometimes I wonder if all their work is strictly needed. For example, in a kind of adorable paternalism, they switched the blown-up calendars on the wall so instead of having the days and dates for January 2023, February 2023, etc. they now have the dates for January 2024 until you get to November when it switches back to 2023. Clearly, this was long-planned as they had ladders and everything. Whether it could have been done at the end of the actual year, I will leave it the reader.

16. The school year begins in April. They switch Assistants in August hence why I moved here then.

17. Much the same criticism is made of short-term posts in Civil Service and military roles the world over. John Dempsey writing in Politico about the failure of the Afghanistan invasion to improve the country wrote: “American officers rotating through Afghanistan on short-term deployments can never fully understand the network of relationships behind the formal chain of command [of local players]. I saw this firsthand in 2012 after working to relieve a clearly incompetent border police commander. After several months of cajoling his chain of command the officer was relieved. I had been told of his family connections, but felt his incompetence was surely enough to keep him out of uniform. Of course, I was wrong. By the time I returned in 2014, two generations of advisors had passed through the border police headquarters and he had reassumed command.”

18. Or sometimes disrespectful.

19. The student, that is.