Gogatsu Satsuki-Sensei: World History

Your classes are weird, to say the least: especially during the month of may. Your birthday is May 31st, so the rest of the month is at least partially occupied by 'things that happened on my birthday throughout history' lessons. This annoys your students a great deal, it annoys the school board even more: you don't care, you've got Tenure. More to the point, a lot of the other teachers in the Ohirrora City Public School System, think that (as long as you don't let the students slack on the rest of the curriculum,) this kind of 'in-depth' learning will help the students achieve more in their collegiate studies and as adults when researching obscure topics will become more important than just what is in the textbook. That's not the entire extent of the weirdness though: you also teach a lot of what you think of as 'deep history'.

Most teachers gloss over the accomplishments of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and ancient Chinese in a week or two when teaching World History. You spend 3/4ths of the first month after summer vacation on it then another week in the second. (And you deliberately chose Ohirrora City as your place of work in part because it holds school on Saturday as well as the 'weekdays', much like a significant percentage of other Japanese cities.) That's 24 days of 50-minute classes studying the oldest civilizations in the world before either Japan or Greece is even mentioned ONCE. Throughout the year you play a long game of "Connections" where the students have the fact that everything of consequence that has occurred since around 3000 BC was influenced, (or sometimes even pre-determined,) by events hundreds, (perhaps thousands,) of years prior drilled into their heads with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Step by Step you lay out the march of history, from the age when it was thought that the gods walked among mortals and Mammoth ruled the tundra, to the collapse of Japanese imperialism in the face of a simple but inescapable fact: the nation you all love and honor is a series of largeish volcanic islands in the midst of the ocean, and though Japan has mighty spirits to guide it and an indomitable will, your population is, (and always has been,) simply too small to defeat an empire the size of some continents. IF, if, Japan had stayed well away from the Nazis, and if they had let Hawaii go unmolested, and if they had not, at that time, tried to challenge communist China, perhaps Japan would now be a world superpower. Other avenues could have been explored: the Philippines and the South Pacific would have furnished immense potential for resources, growth, and living space all by themselves! There was no need to confront major world powers when a huge swath of loosely affiliated and underdeveloped territory which could be dominated by your mighty navy was right there for the taking! But, a culture of blood-glutted pride, of unthinking loyalty to those above them in power and station, and the absolute certainty that the sun herself was on their side: led the policymakers of that era to arrogance and hubris which proved the downfall of the empire they had sought to build.

The rest of history you DO gloss over in a week or two, you tell them to go read the microfilm archives of the various Ohirrora City newspapers at the library because, Ohirrora City being a major seaport, their international sections have mostly been excellent. You tell them that Google is everyone's friend, that if they figure out what search terms to use: all the data on earth is at their fingertips! But, above all, your task is not to teach them world history, no: it is trying to show them how to think for themselves: to RESEARCH the topics they wish to know, to identify slant, bias, and revisionism, then, having done so, separate the good rice of FACT from the chaff of opinion.

Today is yet another day of that never-ending battle with the hydra of lies and forgetfulness that constantly gnaws at The Truth: a hydra you have dedicated your life to fighting until your last dying breath. The passage of years has erased so much that we once knew, secrets unnumbered and events uncountable lost to the never-ending pounding of time's unrelenting surf; but for the past seven years, you have stood along the shore, piling up endless sandbags to keep the roaring ocean back...

Will it all have been worth it?

In the next few days, the answer will be made plain for all to see.