Tag Archives: high school

Toy Story Pencil — Japanese Entrance Exam Folklore

Nationality: Japanese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Nagoya, Japan
Performance Date: 3/23/12
Primary Language: Japanese
Language: English

In Japan, unlike America, college admission is determined by one’s passing or failing of one entrance exam on one specific day. There are no chance for re-takes, and there is no alternate test. The rules are strict; if you happen to be sick on that one day, if you get into a car crash on the way there, you could either take the exam while sick or injured, or wait and study for another whole year to take the exam the year after. Furthermore, the rules dictate that you may only take one entrance exam per day. If two prospective schools are having their entrance exams on the same day, you are required to choose the one you prefer more. Students in Japan begin to study for their college entrance exams usually as early as their last year of middle school, studying for a total of four or more years (at school, at home, and in cram schools whose classes often go well past midnight) in preparation for one exam on one day. The rules are strict, admission to the four or five most prestigious programs that everyone tests for is notoriously difficult, and all the hard work may come down to being sick on the one day that determines the course of your life. The system, in a word, is merciless.

My informant lives in Nagoya, Japan, and had up until a month ago, been snared in this system. Having completed her college entrance exam and confirmed her entrance to Sophia University, she looked back on the past few years of her life and told me that it must have been the most stressful time of her life, but that she had her “Toy Story pencil” to help her out. Laughing, half-joking, she said that it actually must have been the pencil that had allowed her to pass the exam.

The “Toy Story pencil” had risen out of a legend circulated at her high school. A few years back, a male student from their high school had passed the entrance exam to Tokyo University, arguably the most prestigious school in Japan. This by itself would not have been legend-worthy, except that nobody had expected very much of him; he had begun to study for the entrance exam his final year of high school when everybody else had already been studying for years, and was ranked a little bit below average in his class. People knew of him, however, because of his obsession with Disney and especially with Toy Story. He watched all the movies, went full-out Woody on Halloween, had a Toy Story pencil case, and was apparently very skilled at drawing pictures of all the characters.

When word got around that he had been accepted to Tokyo University, the rumors and the legends began. He apparently had a pen that he had been using for years, a Toy Story pen that he had bought at some local stationery store. It was well known amongst his immediate classmates that he took pride in the fact that he had not lost that pen for his entire final year of high school, the year that he had finally begun to study for the exam. “He took that pencil everywhere,” My informant said. “I mean, it’s really hard not to lose pencils. I must go through at least like, ten or so a year. So it was pretty impressive, actually.” Thus, the younger students at the high school immediately latched onto the pen as a source of good luck magic in exam-taking, making it a sort of folk object–if you could use that pencil and only that pencil for your final year of high school, and you didn’t lose it and it didn’t break, you would be able to pass any entrance exam you took. My informant and her friends, who had not known the Toy Story boy but had long heard of the legend, had dutifully bought their one and only Toy Story pencil at the beginning of their final year. My informant used the Toy Story pen every day, careful not to break it, keeping track of it all times, and eventually passed the exam to her dream school, Sophia University. There were others though, of course, that used the pencil and failed their exams, but then again, said my informant, the pencil was more of a motivational tool than anything else–just having it made one feel more in control. Over her spring break when she visited me, she gave me a Toy Story pencil and told me that if I took care of it, I would probably see good results for the rest of the semester, and I am still using it now.

This intense fixation on an object for good luck, I believe, arises naturally from Japan’s merciless education system. In this system, the students themselves have little to no control. There is one exam per year; there is a pass or fail. “There are,” said my informant, “so many things that could go wrong. I could’ve gotten sick, and they would’ve just said, too bad, come back next year. I tried so hard for the week before the exam not to go out of the house and to eat healthy and sleep a lot, but still. Everyone gets so paranoid before the exams, and there’ve been stories of people sabotaging each other. There’s so much anxiety.” Anxiety, I thought, was the key word. The Toy Story pencil was a small but effective way to soothe anxiety that could give way to more anxiety. It gave people confidence, which perhaps made them study harder.

The Toy Story pencil reflects the intense collective fear and anxiety in the minds of Japanese students concerning the entrance exam procedure. Grabbing at straws, the students at my informant’s high school had clung to this legend, this folk object, to give themselves some semblance of control–and perhaps, strangely enough, it works.

 

 

 

Exploding Toilets and A Corpse — Senior Prank Legend

Nationality: Japanese
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: Tustin, California
Performance Date: 2/24/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Japanese

My informant goes to high school in Tustin, California, where he is currently a junior. A few months earlier, he had heard of a legend of a senior prank that had occurred perhaps ten or so years back, where they had flushed all the toilets at the school at the same exact time to see what would happen to the plumbing.

They had these stopwatches, right, and all these walkie talkies, and they pressed the stopwatches at the same time and flushed the toilets just as the timer went down to zero. They wanted to see if a pipe somewhere would explode I guess, but then, instead, two toilets just blew up. Uh, I think one was a female staff toilet, and the other was in one of the main guys’ bathrooms. The toilets just like, blew apart, all the porcelain and whatnot. Which was fine and all, except later when they were trying to clean up the exploded toilets, the fixer-upper guy found a hole in the wall of the bathroom and looked through it and there was uh, a dead body in there, like scrunched up and still fresh-looking, like a girl just crawled in there and curled into a ball and died or something. Anyway, he thought she was dead, but then he’s staring at her and he can’t move because he’s so freakin’ scared, and she turns her head towards him kind of, and she doesn’t have eyes, like they’re just sockets on her face, and in the sockets there’s one of those millipede things that comes crawling out. Anyway, the plumber guy told everyone but nobody really believed him because they checked later and it was gone, but still. And they fixed the toilets and stuff, but man. The guys’ bathroom is a freakin’ scary place.

No one knows where this legend originated from, although my informant said that his Latin teacher, who had worked at the school for two decades, does remember a senior prank where the seniors all flushed the toilets at once–though he does not remember anything happening as a consequence. “I’m pretty sure toilets don’t explode even if you flush a whole bunch of them at once,” My informant said, laughing, “but it makes sense that the stories spread because the bathrooms are freakin‘ disgusting here, like really bad. And it smells so much that we probably wouldn’t notice a corpse for a while.”

I feel like the legend is significant because it pits teenagers, most of whom think of themselves as invincible, against death, even if it is a very unrealistic and cinematic depiction of it. School is a place for boredom, for homework and tedious routine–to introduce a corpse into such a scene is jarring, and sets the entire nature of their everyday lives off-balance. That the legend became so widespread, however, is not surprising; people like a good scare, and school is a place of boring routine. Although my informant and his classmates probably thought this legend was very original, there are probably many, many legends of something similar to this in schools all across the world.

 

“I’m gonna do so badly on this” — Student Folk Belief

Nationality: Vietnamese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: 3/23/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese, Japanese

My informant is a Vietnamese student currently attending high school in Irvine, California in a predominantly Asian-American neighborhood. She was born in Irvine and has lived there all her life, and the high school she attends now, ranked in the top ten public high schools in America, is notorious for its rigor, and its extremely studious students. When I asked her whether she knew superstitions pertaining to her school, she jumped up with this one almost immediately:

I know it’s probably not just my school, and there are probably people that do this in schools everywhere, but I think it’s especially bad here because everyone does it and everyone really believes in it too. Like, before a test, you’re never supposed to say out aloud that you think you’re ready. Ever, like, it’s taboo or something. You’re always supposed to say, “Oh my God, I’m so screwed,” or like, “I’m gonna do so badly on this,” because otherwise, there’s this stupid superstition that you’re gonna fail. [Laughing] And it’s really annoying when the super-smart kids do it too, and you know they’ve studied for like the past week straight, and they’re saying things like, “Oh, I just started studying yesterday,” and I’m like, “No you didn’t!” Like, if you say you think you’re ready and you think you might do well, people kind of look at you like you’re being cocky or arrogant or something. And then people say all the time how once, they thought they were ready for a test and said so, and they ended up failing. And then the next time they like, lowered their expectations or whatever, and said they were gonna fail, and they end up getting an A-plus. Everyone does it. [Smiling] I mean, it’s stupid, but I do it too. What’s better than like, not having any expectations at all, you know?

In a school culture dominated by grades and academics, this superstition, which is, as she said, probably present in any high school, is intensified and ritualized. Saying, “I’m gonna do so badly on this” is a student trying to lower their expectations in case the test is more difficult than they had thought, and at the same time trying to disarm, in a way, “the competition,” as my informant put it. “People at my school are super-competitive.” She said. “It’s funny, like, there’d be people that would even argue about which one was more not ready, so that if they did get a bad grade it’d be justified or something.”  The lower the expectations, the less the disappointment would probably be–which is why it is such a good defense mechanism.

That these students even need a superstition like this seems testament to the immense amounts of pressure placed on them as high school students expected to advance to prestigious universities. By telling themselves and others that they aren’t ready for an exam, they push the blame for a bad grade on not being ready, instead of, perhaps, the scarier alternative, which is not being smart enough. A minor superstition, but its proliferation at her high school probably expresses a certain terror for not being capable enough–we can always try harder, but if we try really hard and we still can’t get a good grade, then where do we go? Are we just not smart enough? And that question is what these students seem the most afraid of.

 

Model UN Pick-Up Lines

Nationality: American, Polish, Russian, a little bit of French
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Ithaca, New York
Performance Date: March 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: None

“Model UN pickup lines are used at Model UN conferences by high school students. In committees, which can range in size from five people to five hundred people… there’s a note passing system where different representatives of countries can pass each other notes. Ummm…  traditionally these notes are for informational purposes that relate to the speeches and resolution writing. Informally, people use these notes to try to pickup delegates, so, the thing about Model UN pick-up lines is they specifically are puns that relate to debate and parliamentary procedure and sometimes the countries that are being represented. Typical pickup lines…. ummm, okay, one of the most creative pickup lines is, ummm, okay, hmmm, “I motion to ally with Greece and invade Djibouti.” Another one is, ummm, “I’d like to see your position on the floor,” and it’s funny because you write position papers. [laughs] A less creative one is, “I’d like to moderate your caucus.” I think it’s less creative because it doesn’t make too much sense. You just have to say it in a certain way for it to sound like a pickup line. Ummm… so, this one I got was great when I was representing South Africa at a conference, and the line was, “I wish I was Lesotho so I could be inside you.” Lesotho is a tiny country inside of South Africa. It’s completely landlocked and surrounded by South Africa. Oh my gosh, there is this other one… “wanna bang my gavel?”

I learned these pickup lines from generations of Model UN students. The older students will teach the new delegates these lines. I’ve been to conferences at Brown University and the University of Chicago and heard or read, on notes, some of the same pickup lines at both. The lines are pretty standard for Model UN conferences because parliamentary procedure stays the same.

I think they’re funny because it makes the committee experience much more enjoyable. You’re getting bored and someone sends you a pickup line in a note and it really brightens your day.”

 

The informant told me about these pickup lines while reminiscing about her high school days. She was laughing a lot and generally seemed to have fond memories of these pickup lines, despite that fact that they are pretty cringe-worthy. She belonged to a very competitive model United Nations team while in high school, but her fondest memories seem to be of the sillier things that happened at the model UN conferences.

The informant said she enjoyed the pickup lines because they provided entertainment, as the committee sessions would drag on for hours. I think the purpose and enjoyment of the pickup lines goes a little deeper than that. The lines make a lot of sense within the context of where they are used. When you are away at a conference for three to four days, surrounded by teenagers ranging from 14-18 years old, pretending to be older diplomats debating world issues, there are a lot of different factors coming into play. For instance, you have all of these hormonal teenagers shoved into a room together. Also, a lot of the teenagers who attend these conferences are pretty nerdy, and the pickup lines seem to be a way of reclaiming their status as more typical or sexualized teenagers. Most model UN conferences have a delegate dance on the last night of the conference, and the dances are a place where the delegates get to let loose and act like typical teenagers. The nerdy pickup lines seem to help the students tee-up for this dance. Additionally, many teenagers have difficulty telling their crushes that they like them, but sending an anonymous pickup line note to a student from a school from another state or another county who you will likely never see again is a safe way to flirt.

Riddle

Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Norwalk, CA
Performance Date: March 4, 2007
Primary Language: Korean
Language: English

When I first came upon this riddle, I was in my senior year of high school.  I was in my English class waiting for the bell to ring and I had nothing to do.  Therefore, one of my friends turned around and told me this riddle.

In the riddle, there are two men in a bar.  They decide to play poker for a bit of money.  After several games, the first man has lost most of them and is in debt.  However he doesn’t have any money to pay the second man.  Therefore, he decides to try and run away without paying his opponent.  He runs into his car, rolls up the window, and locks the door.  The second man walks out angrily with a gun and shoots and kills the first man.  However, no damage is done to the car.  There are no scratches, no bullet holes, or any other mark.  One man was in the car while the other was outside, and yet no visible sign of damage existed.  How did this happen?

The answer to the riddle is that the first man was in a convertible.  As there was no roof to the car, the second man was able to kill the first without damaging the car.  When I first heard this riddle, I couldn’t comprehend how the situation could exist.  It seemed impossible that the first man could be killed when he was separated from the second man by the car.  It didn’t occur to me until later that he could be in a convertible.  As with many other people, I was looking at the riddle with a narrow mind and failed to see the other possibilities that existed.  It wasn’t until I began to question what I assumed to be true that I saw the answer.  I had been determined that the car was a regular car that I didn’t realize it could be otherwise.  Thus, this reflects upon the inability of people to see things as they truly are and their tendency to believe things as they are familiar with.

The riddle also reflects upon the American belief of justice.  Because the first man had tried to run away without paying the second man, it was only fair that he was killed.  The riddle presents no ill feelings towards the second man for committing murder but rather focuses on how the first man was killed.  It seems to suggest that the first man deserved to die and there was no surprise that he did.  This is similar to the response the riddle elicits in the listeners.  They don’t feel compassion for the dead man but instead accepts that his death was justified.  The murder itself isn’t what bothers the listeners; it’s how the murder was committed that confuses them.  Therefore, this riddle exemplifies the belief system of Americans on justice.