Watching Ikiru on School Year's Eve

I start back at school tomorrow. It's not the first day of classes, but the ever-metastasizing gauntlet of meetings and trainings that educators must go through before the school year starts. (How else will the ever-growing corps of administrators justify their existence?)

Due to how awful and difficult the last school year was and the Delta surge I had been thinking about this school year with a great deal of anxiety and trepidation. I look around at my non-educator friends who are also white collar professionals but aren't expected to show up to the office most days and get resentful. I think about all of the sacrifices and extra work I did over the last year and a half in order to completely alter my teaching practice from top to bottom TWICE, which was not rewarded with extra pay from my employer or respect from other people in society, many who really seem to hate teachers. I saw the latter as a history educator this summer, witnessing the reactionary mobs scream about "critical race theory" and making laws that would basically make it illegal in many places to teach the actual events of American History. After a year and a half of wearying sacrifice, it felt like getting punched in the face.

Reader, I will be honest and admit I did a thought experiment last week. I asked myself, if I was offered some dumb useless corporate job that paid me the same as my modest salary and allow me to work from home half the time, would I take it? I decided I would take it in a heartbeat. 

Today I changed my mind because of a Japanese movie from 1952.

With the school year looming and my kids in day camp and my wife at work, I decided to use Monday and Tuesday this week to watch the movies I would not subject my family to but which require too much concentration for me to watch late at night when everyone is asleep. Today I decided to watch Ikiru, since I love Kurosawa but have mostly watched his movies set far off in the past.

Ikiru's title means "To Live." It is the story of a local bureaucrat named Kanji Watanabe. At the start of the film he is an old man detached from those around him, focused on his work but mostly just pushing paper and avoiding actually doing anything of substance. His diligence and hesitance to rock the boat helped him rise to the top of his department, but he is clearly not a happy man. He then discovers that he has stomach cancer, and thus six months to live.

At this point he questions his life. His wife had died years before and he had dedicated himself to providing for his son. However, his workaholic ways meant he never emotionally connected with him, and his son is thus more concerned about his inheritance than his father's health. This of course breaks his heart, and he first reacts to impending death by becoming decadent, going out to bars and brothels. This does not satisfy, so he strikes up a friendship with a young woman who clerked in his office. She still has a zest for life which lifts his spirit, but as a young person she gets bored with their relationship. At this point Watanabe realizes what he needs to do. He goes back to work.

However, he does not go back to work as before. At the beginning of the film we see a group of women trying to get a cesspool in their neighborhood covered and a playground built. They get the runaround from Watanabe, who as the head of Public Affairs is supposed to be helping them. When he goes back he throws himself into this project, pushing the stodgy bureaucrats in the other departments to get this important work done. The day the park is completed, he dies, satisfied that he had actually done something. At his funeral dinner the other bureaucrats try to avoid giving him credit for the park, but the mothers come in weeping, despondent that they lost the one man with power who had actually listened to them. The bureaucrats then realize they too should be spending their lives more fruitfully.

It's often not pleasant to think about death, but it is clarifying. Yes teaching under COVID is grueling, and yes it forces me to take risks and reimagine my work in ways I would not have had to do had I gone to law school. Needless to say, it pays a lot less, too. But this film was a reminder to me that my work MATTERS. At a time when reactionaries are trying to force false propaganda about the past on our students, my work in the classroom is necessary. I know too that what I do has had an impact on so many people who still bother to remember me and talk to me. That's what gets me up in the morning. Now time to get to work.