Explore everyday life in Japan

The School Swimming Pool

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It’s no secret that Japanese children are responsible for cleaning their schools on a daily basis.

Everyday after recess, or sometimes after the last class of the day, students divide into groups and report to assigned locations where they meet with a group leader and are given tasks that range from sweeping the floor, taking out the garbage, cleaning the windows, washing smears and smudges off the walls, dusting doorways, desks, and other things, cleaning out shoe lockers, and mopping the floors in a very unique way—by bending down and pressing a damp towel to the floor with both hands, then pushing it up and down long hallways at a running pace.

The duration of this cleaning period depends on the school, but generally it lasts somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes. After the cleaning period has come to an end, students once again report to their cleaning leader (generally an upper classman) and review what they did well and what they need to improve on. To ensure that students remain on task and that group leaders fulfill their duties, a teacher is also assigned to each group and manages the group leader.

While this is a great idea in theory, in practice, like most things, it only works as well as the people who are involved, specifically the teachers. If the teachers who oversee the group leaders and set the expectations for the group as a whole don’t do their jobs well, nothing gets cleaned thoroughly and students tend to use this time to talk, laugh, or space out. It’s not uncommon to find students sleepily sitting on the ground looking at their laps while pathetically moving a small sponge back and forth near their knees a centimeter or two.

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Another aspect of school cleaning that is probably less well known is preparing the school pool for the swimming block of PE class.

This is a task that is often given to sixth grade students in elementary school and that the various boys’ sports teams do in junior high school. Occasionally, teachers and PTA members will help as well.

School pools in Japan tend to be outdoors, either somewhere on the school grounds (near the baseball and soccer fields) or on the roofs of the schools. For three quarters of the year, these pools are left as is, uncovered and exposed to the elements, which means that leaves and dirt gather at their bottoms and the water in them slowly turns green. Then, prior to summer, usually at the beginning or middle of June, they are drained and students, along with some teachers, are given the task of climbing into them with bare feet, scrubbing them clean with long handled, stiff bristled brushes, and spraying them down with powerful hoses.

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Image Credits: All images in this post are original.

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This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.

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If you missed my last post, you can find it here A Parking Violation.