2010-9-26
I felt bad about what I had written in the previous chapter.
This happened more than forty years ago.
At my alma mater, there was a science teacher whose background included having worked on the design of the Zero fighter…
His face was (forgive me) a case of “a cracked pot with a patched lid.”
It happened when this teacher came to supervise a regular examination, perhaps an end-of-term test, in either modern Japanese or classical Japanese…
I was sitting in the very front seat…the seat directly in front of this teacher.
I placed the answer sheets, which had been passed forward in turn from the back, on the teacher’s desk.
The teacher began checking and counting the answer sheets, and a few seconds later…his expression changed to one of astonishment…I think I must have been the only one watching…then, with eyes like those of a pigeon struck by a pellet from a pea shooter, he said…Is everyone in this class named Niyōtei Shimei!
In the place where the examinee’s name would normally be written, the answer to a question…Futabatei Shimei…had been written instead.
The reason I have occasionally remembered this incident and laughed over these past forty-odd years…lies in the genuinely startled expression of the teacher, who had probably been lost in meditation during the examination…and also in the way he read Futabatei Shimei…as Niyōtei…just what one might expect of a Zero fighter designer.
Sitting right in front of him, I understood what had happened a moment before the teacher did, but the teacher, who understood a moment after I did, looked embarrassed, or whatever one might call it,
Mr. T of Kurikinton reminded me of this private funny story of mine, which even my classmates do not know.
Incidentally, I think our company’s senior managing director has been made to hear this story at least three times…
Because I really do sometimes suddenly remember it and laugh…
And each time, the senior managing director has to hear it.