I have been brought to the brink of a nervous breakdown. I contemplated very lightly and romantically the concept of suicide. My situation is unique in that I live in Japan and the woman who bullied me is the only other English speaking employee at the school. To make matters worse, we were put into the same office, much like a pen.
From the first day I worked she treated me like shit and condescended me. She told me to my face that Mr. Motoda, the man in charge of hiring me, did not do his job properly when he chose me because I was not qualified to do this job. From then on she constantly passive-aggressively badgered me. She would make it a point to say “Enjoy your mid-week weekend” about my day off on Wednesday (as I am part time) instead of just saying “See you later.” I confronted her about this and she made excuses that I can’t remember.
She would talk to me non-stop when I was trying to study Japanese and narrate her Facebook feed out loud. I began to move to the library at the school for peace. After a while of this habit she told me, “You really like the library, huh?”
Then when our contracts were being renewed and she kept prying Into whether or not I was being hired for the next year, I tried to keep my status anonymous as it was my business. I snuck to the vice principal to finalize the deal, but when I arrived back at the office she was waiting and told me she had heard I was renewing. I was sneaking around my own school to avoid her, but she still found a way to invade my space.
The early years at our school presented us with terrible students due to the school being private and lacking high academic standards. It was more a pay-to-play situation. So, our senior students were some of the most inconsiderate kids I had encountered and anyone would feel frustrated trying to deal with them. Without thinking I plopped myself in the chair, sighed and offhandedly said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.” She told me that she would have to report what I said to the principal. I was preoccupied with my issues and barely heard her. I brushed her off and said something like, “Do what you gotta do,” not really understanding what the hell she was talking about. However, she actually went to the management and told them that I had said verbatim that I “don’t like teaching.”
She would overpower me with her opinions without taking into consideration my own and eventually I stopped talking to her altogether. However, she would still engage me in conversation regardless if I was studying. Eventually I began listening to YouTube meditation videos before school to try and deal with the onslaught of the coming day with her. Once I didn’t have time at home to listen to my meditation video so I tried to do it at school. I had headphones on and I remember she approached me and I could see her mouth moving. I took my headphones out and she said something unimportant that I couldn’t remember if I tried. Then I put my headphones back in. We repeated this process—I kid you not— four times. Then I went to the roof and silently screamed.
She once came into the office one morning and just started screaming at the top of her lungs. She was mad about what she perceived as sexual harassment from one of the students. It’s a complicated issue to explain, but I had discussed the issue at length with many Japanese women and they told me that my Western psychopathic coworker was overreacting and they all just laughed. My coworker would often cry, lose her temper or just be volatile in general at work.
What Is most interesting about her is that her father was a counselor. She told me even about her experiences with psychopaths and how they were very scary in real life. She once told me that she “would make a great boss” and that all her coworkers at her old job “loved” her. She once asked me if I was confident in my lesson plans. I said I would always have doubts. When I asked her, “You?” She said without blinking an eye, “100%” She once told me to “say thank you” to a child. By the way, I am a 36 year old adult male.
I had talked to her about her passive aggressive mentioning of my days off. We ended up exposing her self-righteous attitude that my offhanded comment about not liking English teaching was enough to make me unworthy of the duty in her eyes. I told her, “If you ask a taxi driver if this was their destiny, do you think they would all say yes? People have to make a living and can still do a good job doing it.” Despite trying to bring this difference of opinions out in the open, it didn’t change anything.
Finally, I had had enough and while shaking I talked to one of the heads of the school, Mr. Ato. I did my best to explain 3 years of abuse and he finally said in English, “She’s—uh…mental.” For once in my 3 years, I felt validated. I asked the management to move me to a different office and they did. For a brief moment I experienced pure bliss. She didn’t visit me and we had nothing to do with each other.
Then suddenly she came to me with a scheme. She told me she had heard some rumors that the English department was changing directions and that our jobs might disappear. According to her the principal had alluded to some changes and we needed to get with the program or face the consequences. I, a native simpleton, freaked out for a good 10 minutes and bought into it. Her plan of action was a unilaterally decided change of curriculum. She decided we were all taking a new direction as an English department even though she is not a boss, just an employee who teaches classes completely separate from me. Little did I know, this was her way of entangling me back into her sinister web once more. I agreed thinking that the best tactic was just to pretend to care and nod my head so that she would quickly leave the vicinity of my office. However, that was my grave mistake.
From then on I became her slave. She gave me deadlines and new tasks as if she were a boss until the point where I had to confront her and make myself clear to her once more. “I am not your employee…Please keep all conversations work-related from here on out.” And she abided, but she simply changed the definition of “workplace conversations.” After more annoying updates about the direction of English education in Japan and her thought process into every detail of her papers, she finally came to me with a new emergency. This time, she had seen a memo in the morning online Teams bulletin board and saw that the OE of Oral English had been replaced with question marks. I literally never read a single memo, so of course I would not have seen this. She came to me saying that we were once again in danger of losing our jobs and we must act quickly. So she had called a meeting with the boss in order to confront Mr. Suginomori who she had dictated was the enemy of her plan. She saw the was ignoring her e-mails and had plans to squeeze us out of our positions.
As a part-time worker, I don’t want to be involved in any of these discussions. If I am fired, I simply will find a new job, as people do. This was all extraneous information. Feeling frustrated, scared and mostly exhausted with her bullshit, I fell back on my age-old tactic of just agreeing with everything she said and then not following through. However, now I had inadvertently agreed to attend a meeting which was brought about to confront a Japanese English teacher. He is a good man, though a little old fashioned, and she had not once confirmed what was actually happening. She simply made up a situation in her head and then tried to manipulate me into getting what she wanted.
I have played dumb for the entire 5 years of my employment to maintain the upper hand. She had no idea that I had requested that we be put in separate offices. She came to me and complained about it and I pretended to listen.
Actually, once I came back from Summer vacation to find that my lunch box had gone missing. Something you must understand about Japanese society is that they do not steal. That is a 96% true statement. The nearly never steal and it would be an astronomical anomaly for someone in a private school of well-off students and teachers to want to steal a bento box that was made for a 6’ 3” Western man, probably too big to fit into their valise. However, when I asked my co-worker about it she told me, “Well, I don’t know, but someone probably got annoyed that it was taking up that space for so long. The Japanese people would find it rude.” Clearly she threw away my bento box out of spite or some bizarre personal code of ethics.
Anyway, I began to feel the anxiety I used to feel when we shared an office together again. I would wake up sometimes and she was already on my mind, and if you know me at all, to have work on my mind after work is the last thing I would ever do. So, I knew that I would have to deal with her once more despite having already having a conversation with her about professional boundaries. In the previous discussion I told her that we should keep our communications “work-related” and that any other conversation should be avoided In order for us to make the best use of our time.
She obeyed this for a bit and then eventually came to invade my space and boundaries once again. Her excuse for doing so was in a similar vein to her first attempt, the possible loss of our livelihood.
So, for weeks I agonized over how I would word my NEXT conversation with her. I wrote 5 or 6 drafts of many different letters. Some of the first ones were similar to this except more spiteful, delineating every single thing that happened and my psychology behind pretending that I cared about the things she cared about. I thought that the pivot on which our problem teetered was the fact that she could not respect the fact that I don’t invest myself into the work as much as she believed I should, but that that was just an opinion and nothing more. Other drafts were evil hate letters. Finally, I came up with a professional solution which stated that I felt stressed being told I was going to lose my job every month and it was making it difficult to do my work. I told her that I wanted to reiterate my previous statement by redefining what I meant by “work-related conversation.” This definition did not included unfounded gossip and our discussions did not need to take an entire hour because they could easily be completed in ten minutes.
Her reply was that I was sending her “mixed messages” because I had stated I was interested in being included in decisions about the English department. However, she had created an entire curriculum and began to implement it without gaining anyone’s consent. This is a clear difference from what tense she decided to use for the verb in question 4 on worksheet number 11.
I snapped. I knew the whole time that if I lose my cool, I would lose everything, but I am only a man and I have my limits. This exceeded my limit. So, I told her everything I’m telling you now and more. So, now it was all in the open.
When I talked to the management, they listened to me go on for 20 minutes and all they said was, “We sympathize. Can you put it in writing? Try and relax for your summer vacation and come back refreshed.” They didn’t give a rats ass what happened to me. Now I had not only made myself exposed to my psychopathic coworker, but I had also made myself appear to fit the stereotype of the emotionally unhinged and sloppy Westerner. My ass was flapping in the breeze and I had no energy left.
I dejectedly sulked around the school asking literally 4 different people who needed to stamp my fucking vacation paper to get it approved with all conflicting answers on what was already the most humiliating day of my life. My soul left my body. I went to the roof and looked past a locked fence. I imagined climbing over it, looking down at the concrete from the fourth floor, and what it might feel like to plummet to a beautiful, emancipatory smack. I had psychologically and physically come to realize why so many people in Japan come to commit suicide. All channels had been tapped and there was absolutely no support system in place. As soon as you are not harmonious for even a second you are the instant pariah. You are collectively repulsed and flaked like a dead skin cell, because to the Japanese, a show of emotion is nearly sickening. It disgusts them and only proves your weakness. After all this time trying to keep my cool, I had lost.
Now I am still in the thick of this situation. I don’t know whether I will quit, how my coworker has reacted to my second confrontation, and whether the school will simply fire both of us now for being troublesome, emotional foreigners.
However, I have finally learned what it was that was plaguing me and tormenting me. It was a psychopath in the flesh. I had a tendency to feel sorry for her on several occasions because she had nothing else in her life and was trying to create meaning through imaginary battles and enemies, much like Don Quixote. But I had already told myself multiple times that if I felt the urge to humanize her that I needed to clip it off deliberately because those were the times I was made vulnerable and she struck like a cobra. So when she came to my desk a final time before summer break to hand off some papers she made it was like staring the into the face of the devil herself.
Her head creaked and as she twisted it slowly towards mine in my seat. I muttered, “Thank you.” Gnashing her teeth, she interrupted me as she always does and said with a grin that would make Nosferatu shit his pants, “I finally got around to making that phrasal verb worksheet. I hope you have a wonnnnnnnnnnderful summer.” Then she slithered out of the room as fast as she could.
Not only do I see why Japanese crime basically is outbursts of uncontrolled rage and suicide, but I also have seen into the mind of a killer. I have pondered so many times if she is a sinister mastermind or the world’s most unaware imbecile, and therein lies the danger of a psychopath. Heed my tale and keep your senses sharp because you might be the next unsuspecting victim of their guiles.
I have had a mental breakdown and am reconsidering continuing my work there. I am considering any remaining avenues of reform, but I am beginning to believe that my sanity is not worth the cost. I hope that my story can help another person who is struggling like me because I have never encountered anything like this in my life. We like to believe that God is real and that we can make the world fair and society is civilized, but at the end of the day it truly is a Darwinian free for all. I am no conservative, but I can’t fully deny the death penalty and despite the ridiculous amount of gun-related deaths in America and it’s lackadaisical regulations, one can’t help but wonder after staring a demon in the face whether or not it might not be a bad idea to pack some heat.
Beware. There are soul suckers among our midst.
