Yes, this is actually my daughter, Ulan. This photo is perfection. My wife took this picture in 2015, the day of her 1st grade entrance ceremony. She was 6 years old.
Yes, this is actually my daughter, Ulan. This photo is perfection. My wife took this picture in 2015, the day of her 1st grade entrance ceremony. She was 6 years old.
I get people asking about the time my daughter Ulan was nearly poisoned at school by malicious classmates from time to time. Now that it is over two years in the past, I'll take the time to explain what happened.
It was 2020, and Ulan was in the 6th grade. I think everyone knows how nasty girls can be to each other. Boys will be mean to each other with their fists, while girls will be nasty with their tongues. I have endeavored to raise her to treat others as she would expect to be treated, to love others and to not gossip. I've taught her to live by the Golden Rule, to treat others as you would expect them to treat you. Nevertheless, life can be difficult. I was a shy, eccentric kid growing up. My wife is also shy and eccentric. So it should come as no surprise that our daughter is an eccentric, goofy girl. Looking at the picture of her above, you wouldn't believe that a girl as lovely as she would have self-esteem issues. But she does.
Being an eccentric girl precludes her from being a part of the "cool girls" clique, and the existence of such when there is only one class in her grade is a bit strange to think of. Honestly though, she's found those girls to be boring and... normal. Consequently, Ulan attracts students who are a bit... quirkier. And being half-Japanese/half-Caucasian, it puts her in a rather peculiar position, particularly in the small city we live in. Half-Filipino kids can blend in more easily despite their parentage, but my girl sticks out. And kids her age usually do not want to stick out. Since she was small, I have explained to her that due to the essence of who she is, some people will instantly adore her, while it's possible that some may also instantly resent her. Both are wrong, as people should be judged by their hearts and not their appearances. It is unfair, but this is what one has to deal with when one is considered hafu ("half Japanese") in Japan. It's not outright, malignant racism, but it still can stigmatize people. People will be attracted to Ulan's unique beauty, but others may resent how the Japanese media places half-Japanese people on some sort of pedestal as though they were superior beings, all in the name of forced diversity, which sucks.
So my daughter was in the 2nd grade when we moved from a medium-sized city in Shizuoka Prefecture to this smaller town in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture. Immediately she was quite the sensation at her school, a near celebrity status, until children got used to her. She sort of fit into one circle of friends, but some were not so good. One girl, whom I will just call her A-chan, learned a hard lesson in not spreading rumors and pitting her friends against each other and was subsequently ostracized. I told my girl that A-chan is a sweet girl who still deserved to be her friend, but the circle of friends was pulling her in a different direction. Now that they are in junior high, Ulan and A-chan are very good friends.
There was another girl, B-chan. She sucks. I told Ulan from the beginning that B-chan would never be a good friend to her. She made fun of Ulan and insulted me, too. She was a stingy, Indian-giver. Once she gave my daughter these empty candy boxes that act as whistles, and then demanded that we reimburse her with brand new ones so that she could get free candy from us. She would buy my girl a drink at the convenience store, and then later demanded reimbursement. B-chan is just a low-IQ dingbat and has often annoyed my girl. I could go on, but I won't. There was another girl, whom I shall name K-chan. K-chan had quite a mean streak, and was a bit of a sociopath. She, too, learned a harsh lesson in what happens when you can't be nice to others, and was also friendless for a while.
In 2020, Schools in Japan didn't get locked down so harshly due to COVID as in America and other countries. Schools shut down in March. The school year began in April, and in June the students returned to classes, their heads filled with unscientific, propaganda nonsense like masks-wearing and "social distancing." But life resumed, for what it's worth. Now skip ahead to October 2020. B-chan was very possessive and annoying, and Ulan was getting very annoyed with the way B-chan kept lunging at her neck constantly. So, I taught her how to swipe the girl's hands away as a self-defense maneuver. She did this, and it worked. My daughter felt empowered. She had a good day and came home in a good mood.
The next day, B-chan was making a big pity party, telling everyone how mean and terrible Ulan is to her, and how Ulan hates her (which she didn't). Every time Ulan tried to talk to this idiot girl, she would run away from her. She was whining and even boys were getting involved, telling Ulan to be kinder to B-chan. Ulan came home in a terrible, sad mood. This gossip only increased each day. I told Ulan that any boys who get involved with spats between girls are acting like girls themselves. This was unheard of when I was her age, and any boy doing that would be a total pussy and would get made fun of, I think. But this was happening to Ulan. Now B-chan started hanging around with and commiserating with K-chan, the sociopath.
On the morning of November 13th, when Ulan was not watching, a classmate took my daughter's thermos, dumped out the green tea, filled it with water, and dumped a bleach cleaning drop-in tablet into it. That morning, all the kids had ran laps around the school's track and after they finished and went inside, Ulan took a mouthful from her thermos and when she tasted the bleach, she frantically motioned to her teacher and he made her spit it out. Fortunately, she did not ingest any of it, but it did make her mouth feel terrible. Ulan's homeroom teacher was quite a doofus, a jock PE teacher who never really seemed to get a feel for his own students. When my wife Mayu got a call from him, he tried to make it seem like it was her fault, as if she had cleaned the thermos and did not rinse it out properly. Because Mayu had suffered a concussion the year before and lost her sense of smell, he was insisting that it was probably her fault. Bullcrap. First of all, Mayu doesn't use stuff like that to clean the inside of the thermos. Second of all, I kid you not, the inside of the thermos looked brand new as the natural stain build up had been completely removed. Totally sparkly clean. Even after rinsing it out, I could still smell the chlorine scent. Even Mayu could sort of smell it.
Suddenly after that day, B-chan became artificially nice to Ulan, expressing phony sympathy, suggesting that the culprit must have used a drop-in tablet. (Like I already said, this girl is low-IQ. You can see it in her face.) Then a week after the incident on November 20th, B-chan admitted to poisoning her. Ulan came home that evening, and the plan was for us to go enjoy an evening in Maebashi, going to her favorite sushi restaurant for dinner, etc. Ulan came home crying and locked herself in her room. I was able to coax her to talk with me, and she told me what B-chan had confessed to. We called the school. We went ahead and set about enjoying our evening as planned, while the school had B-chan and her parents come to school for a meeting. I'm sure the girl was told by her parents to deny everything because they were probably scared to death that we would sue the family.
That night, I learned from Ulan that both B-chan and K-chan enjoyed torturing frogs to death. They would capture them in the rice fields nearby and dismember them. She'd even witnessed them doing this at school. Unlike many girls, Ulan loves frogs. Typical Japanese frogs that live in the rice fields only become about the size of the tip of one's thumb, so just a couple of centimeters. They are small and cute and Ulan would often enjoy catching them while growing up. But these other two girls were sadistic and would slowly kill them. Sick.
The next week, we had a sit-down meeting with the principal and several faculty, B-chan, her mother, the useless teacher, and Ulan's teacher from the year before who actually cares about his students. Keep in mind that this is Japan, and here people do not involve the police unless it is really necessary. If Ulan had ingested some chlorine and had gone to the hospital, then the police would definitely have been involved, and something like this could not only attract the local prefectural news, but it might even make the national news. That sort of scrutiny is what any school wants to avoid at all possible.
During that meeting, B-chan continued to deny that she did it. She was in tears. So why did she say she did it? She claimed that she did so to "cheer her up" as if that would somehow cheer her up. She claims she didn't know who did it, and she said that maybe Ulan would feel better if it was one of her friends. This is a big bunch of crap. Nevertheless, it scared the shit out of that little girl and she is lucky that the police did not get involved. The school really did not want the media spotlight shone on them as it would terribly ruin the school's reputation. They were focusing on a "no harm, no foul" attitude and hoped for the best that there would be no further incidents.
I know that upon reading this, you must feel incredulous. But this isn't your culture, and one international couple cannot change a school, much less the entire country, Often the "no harm, no foul" attitude works out for the best, but sometimes it can result in suicide. So look at it from my perspective. As a teacher myself, raising hell over this situation in which it seemed that this dumb girl had done something terribly impulsive without thinking of repercussions, challenging not only the principal but the board of education could have seriously jeopardized my employment in this small city in the mountains. It looked like the best thing to do was to just urge our girl to be careful and wary, and report to us if anything else happened instead of us having to pry it out of her.
It was around this time that K-chan stopped coming to class. She had already established a reputation for being a bully and a bit crazy, and she knew that other kids suspected her of being involved. My theory is that K-chan is the one who came up with the idea of using the bleach drop-in tablet as a revenge and was an accomplice. She really was a nasty girl, however she was off the hook since B-chan had admitted to doing the deed. Eventually, she stopped coming to school altogether.
By 2021, Ulan had learned that K-chan was making disturbing videos of herself on TikTok, saying how she wished to kill herself, etc. I never saw any of this and I've never allowed my daughter to access TikTok, but this is what other students had found. K-chan was deeply disturbed, but apparently felt terrible about what had happened.
K-chan did not attend graduation, but her mom was there. She talked to my wife, and thanked us for Ulan's kindness to her daughter. This woman's daughter had anguished for months up until that point, and could not show her face to her classmates. But her daughter had said how kind Ulan had always been to her, and regretted bullying her for so long when they used to all be friends and got along with each other.
K-chan ended up going to a different junior high when the school year began in April. She was always right on the border of the two schools, and she had already had a reason to attend the other school because of a school club program she wanted to join. B-chan made up with Ulan, and they were friends for at least the first few months of junior high. But she had always been a rotten friend to Ulan. I've always taught Ulan to show kindness to others, to show love even to her enemies just as Christ had taught us. But I told her that this does not include allowing people to continue to hurt her, to be a doormat for them to wipe their feet all over. Just two essays ago, I had written how I had to cut people out of my life who mistreated me. It's difficult, but it is necessary to do so for self-protection.
I haven't even mentioned that there was another girl, Y-chan. This girl was always nice, but she always let B-chan walk all over her. She was a good friend to Ulan, but she was never strong enough to stand up to B-chan and tell her "no more." As a result, Ulan had to distance herself from B-chan and Y-chan. The good thing is that now Ulan has become good friends with A-chan, whom I always thought was a sweet girl. Perhaps Y-chan could become my daughter's friend again someday. For B-chan though, forgiveness isn't enough to redeem her. She will have to turn her life around. She was and had always been a bad friend to my girl.
So what happened with K-chan? Every year now, Ulan and she exchange homemade chocolates for Valentines. Ulan has forgiven her and shown grace to her. I've always told her to love even her enemies, and to be gracious when they seek reconciliation. K-chan never directly admitted to being involved in that poisoning incident, but that's no longer important. They see each other each year at Valentines, and cherish each other's friendship. I pray that this girl has mellowed out now that she's had a fresh start at a new school, and she seems to be doing well, having learned her lesson in not being a notorious bully. Her life was going down a dark path, but it seems that this bad experience helped snap her out of it. She understands now how far things could escalate, and she is happy to experience Ulan's grace and friendship.
This is God moving in my daughter's heart. She doesn't quite understand this fully, but the grace she has shown to K-chan is what God would do for us. Even when we disobey, disbelieve, and even curse His name, God will welcome us with open arms if we so desire it. K-chan had betrayed my daughter's friendship, but by grace Ulan has welcomed her back as a friend. Soon it will be Valentines Day again, and Ulan will again make her own chocolate covered marshmallows to give to K-chan and remind her that she still matters to her.
Next: the long-ass, romantic story of how I fell in love with and married my pen pal Mayu
Go back to the "Greg's Life" Table of Contents
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. ---Proverbs 22:6
mail: greg -atsign- stevethefish -dot- net