It’s not as if I’d known what it meant to be a teacher. At the meek age of twenty, how do you impart anything to anyone? When a teaching company offers you a free six week stay in Japan in exchange for your tutelage, however, you decide to work it out as you go. Naturally, the program is during summer vacation. Naturally, it’s hot.
My days began as such: trudging through the streets of Nishinari-ku with my housemates, head hunched over top heavy with sweat, the drops that didn’t make it down the back of my formerly-crisp white button-up instead flowing through the smooth canal between my eyebrows, launching from the tip of my nose to asphalt. I bet I was leaving a trail as I went, a temporary relief in the sidewalk of my path through the ward. Temporary because, by the time I’d traveled ten feet from their landing, the drops had already sizzled into nothing.
I never liked dressing up. I always found business casual to be stuffy at best, frumpy at worst. And with the liquid pooling in the thin negative spaces between the layers of my waist, my shirt, my black slacks, and my faux leather belt, I was beginning to feel semiaquatic. I was a fish baking in the sun, relying on whatever moisture it had left to survive while taunted by its inability to truly stave off anything. Despite my whole body tingling as if boiling, I was becoming acutely aware of a gradient forming as a result of the differing heat absorption of my white top and black pants. My torso may have felt like it was in a sauna, but my lower extremities were in hell.
The daily walk from the rental apartment I shared with four other teachers to the subway to whatever middle or high school where we were teaching English was devastating. I lived in a house of Gaijin, Japanese slang for foreigners, and each day we stepped out the door it seemed like we’d brought the heat with us. Apparently, it was the hottest it had ever been, or the hottest in years, or just the hottest in Osaka it had ever been or the hottest in Osaka in years. My memory’s melted a bit. I remember that in the distance stood the metallic, virus-like Tsūtenkaku Tower, its familiar lightbulb-on-spiderleg-stilts shape a constant mirror of the commute’s attempt to drain our lifeforce. At least we had each other.
Each week was a new school, each day the same temperature. I’d grown up in famously humid Florida, lived in the dry fever of LA, and still I’d never experienced such heat. It was the kind that makes you so exhausted and dehydrated that the spit in your mouth starts to taste wrong, and you can’t even swallow to feel better. You crave moisture but reject the liquid your body produces—the swelter makes you nonsensical. It wasn’t until I noticed another teacher arriving at school in nylon shorts and a tank, slipping into the restroom, and emerging in office attire that I realized I was doing it all wrong. I remember thinking how stupid I was for not having done the same sooner. At least there was something I could do.
Nishinari-ku was home to the majority of Osaka’s houseless population, and Osaka itself contained the second highest number of unhoused individuals in all of Japan. I’d known this prior to arriving at my program-designated lodging, and I’d known that the more southern Osaka would be hotter than Tokyo, where most of the other teachers would be stationed. I hadn’t made the connection, however, that, sinking in a heatwave, not everyone would make it ashore.
Of the over one hundred teachers that made up the program, my housemates and I were the only ones located in Nishinari-ku. I’d tell my classes where we were staying and the students would laugh, the parents would gasp, and the program coordinators would simply look down in shame for placing us there. We were all so self-involved. But while they may have been perturbed from their more privileged point of view, I was simply happy to be in Japan. The duplex we were living in was gorgeous, and the landlady was beyond kind: greeting us at the entryway on her knees in an almost painfully traditional manner, showering us in bottled corn tea and little cakes. Even with the death that would soon share our block, I felt so lucky to be there.
When I first arrived that summer, I hardly spoke any Japanese, had never been to Japan before, and had never taught in a foreign country until then. I spent each day focused on figuring out the next, on simplicities like what icebreaker to teach and whether to buy an egg or tuna sandwich from 7-Eleven, leaving little to no room for deeper thought. And having grown up in the poor south side of my hometown, I was no stranger to the idea of the “projects” or houselessness. All of that is to say, the first few weeks spent weaving in and out of crowds on our way to and from work, I never stopped to ponder all the ways society might be failing them.
As we navigated the maze of tunnel-like paths through the neighborhood’s rundown outdoor shopping complex—its partially enclosed overhead and sprinkling of cheap food stalls making it ideal for shaded loitering—I never questioned just how hot the fully roofless were. As we passed men and women splayed out in the public park, I failed to notice how they lay flat and stretched out, intuitively maximizing surface area for heat to dissipate from. I knew we were all hot, but my thoughts in those moments failed to advance far enough to ask, “I’m going indoors, but what are they doing?”
On the day we passed a dead body in the street, we sooner blamed it on the Yakuza across the way than the pulse in the air that begged for blood, begging you to boil for it.
The idea of Japanese gangs sounded exotic and nebulous, and this body appeared to be a peek into a hidden world that purported to live right up against ours despite going unseen. As both a coping mechanism for confrontation with death and conversation fodder when discourse ran dry, the body became a thrilling tale of gang violence to be told in small groups. Not until about week four, when the sun had finally melted away my ignorance and Japan had declared the heatwave a natural disaster, did it truly start to click. Only then did I realize that true danger lurked not in things sensational, but in those as mundane as the weather.
In LA they warn you not to leave anything in your car. They warn of guns, of motor vehicle accidents, of unattended drinks at bars, of parabens and sulfates in shampoo. In Japan they warn of visiting hot springs with visible tattoos, of syphilis and giant killer centipedes, of never marrying, of dying from work. Varying physical threats are localized to their respective cultures, or not. They may strike you as starkly different, but they’re also similarly easy to understand. They’re flashy, exciting, and make for great news stories; they capture your attention. You can map them out, comprehend how they occur, guard against them. They fit in your hand and make sense on paper. The grieving process is straightforward, where to place your regret clear as day.
But the idea that it could suddenly be too hot to live, after it had never been that way? We’d been told that it would happen, that it would be soon relative to eternity. We understood that as a global society we have been spraying too much into the air, cutting down too much in the forest, digging up and burning too much from underground. But in 2018, the consequences still felt distant, abstract, and far enough away that there was time.
The program orientation leaders told us it would be hot, that we should be prepared to sweat. I wonder if anyone had told the same to the men and women of Nishinari-ku; to the man who lay dead in the street.
Over one thousand people died that year in Japan, as if evaporated into dust by air almost as foreign as I was. In addition to the thousand that passed, tens of thousands were hospitalized with strokes for living too freely in the light, assuming safety where there in fact was none. In 2019, scientists determined that without anthropogenic climate change, the 2018 heatwave would have been nearly impossible. In this way, those lost to the sun’s rays that summer are among the first proven avoidable climate casualties in history.
Technically, I was in Osaka to hone the English speaking skills of students through the discussion of life planning: what they wanted to be when they grew up and whether or not it had to match what their parents were. One boy wanted to be a professional ballet dancer, and with the class’ goading performed a beautiful spin, like a globe on its axis after the flick of a finger. In classrooms with all the windows open and fans running—many buildings didn’t have AC Units due to never having needed them before—we had student-led debates and crafted presentations on topics of their choosing. At the end of each week-long program, the groups of five students per teacher shared what they’d learned about themselves and the world around them.
While it seemed like important work at the time, the memories of teaching rich children how to plan their lives as if all futures are guaranteed, mere hours after walking past adults whose ideal paths had scorched and slipped through their fingers like hot sand, now elicit intense feelings of cognitive dissonance. When I leave the realm of practical logistics and lean into my guilt, I wish I’d offered my home to some of the men and women in the street. In a simpler way, I just wish I’d brought them water. Looking back, I wish a lot of things. Whenever summer approaches, I think of that dead body and how I was only twenty and how little I could change. What was I really even teaching? What could I even have done?
I haven’t been back to Japan yet, and I know that the temperatures will only continue to rise. I’ve sensed it here as well. On particularly hot days, the image of that body slowly rises from the recesses of my thoughts, like the sun coming over the horizon at dawn. On cooler days, it sets, and I forget.
They say once you get hot enough, you start to feel cold. I hope his spirit rests on ice.