Vanity

The beauty parlor was in full swing. Mirror, brushes, pads, lipstick – cosmetics crowded the desktop. A dumb-looking girl adjusted her fake eyelashes. She applied blush and eyeliner with the vigor of an actress due on stage. All that was missing were the vanity lights, but the oversized mirror was enough to draw the teacher’s disapproval.

She continued primping despite being instructed otherwise. When the teacher walked over, the girl glanced up with a vacant stare, her fingers still on her lashes. I recognized the stare from when I had asked her what she did on vacation. Maybe she didn’t understand a word of English. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

The Japanese take beauty seriously. While it’s taboo to eat or drink on trains, women routinely apply makeup as if they were in the privacy a dressing room. Men trim and reshape their eyebrows (not on board). Some shave them off completely. The grooming begins in junior high school, and is especially noticeable at Kanokita where students prioritize plucking over cracking a book.

Popular in-class treatments include gelling each other’s hair, filing nails and straightening hair – one strand at a time. Even the boys tote oversized mirrors that they prop open on the desk and spend the period perfectly aligning their spiky hair. The mirror reflects their attention away from the board. Such was the case with one punk with a band-aid patched over his eye and a (fake?) Burberry scarf concealing his neck. When done attending to the hair on his head, he shifted gears to tweezing his eyebrows.

In another class, two kids plucked the body hair off of an early bloomer. One friend dutifully worked on the boy’s arms while his exposed leg rested in the other’s lap. He didn’t flinch much, perhaps numbed from the sound of English.

Personal care isn’t all glamour. Sometimes it’s messy. Like when one student got a trim. Or when the normally well-mannered “Harajuku boy” (as I call him ever since spotting him on the train bound for this trendy area of Tokyo) was playing with shards of glass from the mirror he had sent crashing to the floor.

Perhaps following his lead, a girl with a black kit on her desk threw tweezers, eyebrow clipper and eyelash crimpier to the ground in apparent frustration. The girl sitting behind her remained cool, and continued straightening her frustrated friend’s hair with a turquoise comb.

This teacher is sensitive to some classroom salon treatments. Seiko and Maki bring tears to my eyes when using hair spray on each like they’re in a shaving cream fight.

“This room smells funny,” I remarked to the Japanese English teacher after walking into another class. He sniffed and agreed. This time it’s not hair spray; it’s nail polish. I scanned the room for the culprit. A girl with a pink hair clip was painting her nails at the expense of my nostrils.

To avoid confrontation, the teacher asked her not to stop, but to instead do it later. She pleaded for one minute more, and of course ignored the clock and his empty threat. Class began, and so did rawness eating at my throat. Disrespect had crossed the line into physical discomfort.

I mulled an appropriate response. I, too, didn’t want to cause a stink, and realized that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. She didn’t look up when I towered over her desk. I silently stuck out my pinky and received a glittery coating. The Japanese teacher followed suit.

Meanwhile, a misguided boy was working on his own version of nail care. He super glued his thumb and index fingertips together, and raised his hand for me to hail his accomplishment. I gestured back. As long as he wasn’t eating it, everything was relatively OK.