“I’m a little teapot…” the music starts and I wobble from side to side.
“Here’s my handle…” left arm goes out with hand on hip.
“And here’s my spout,” I jerk my right hand outwards…
“When I get all steamed up, hear me shout, tip me over…” I do the action, “and pour me out.”
Cue tepid applause from a half-dozen young mums and their sticky-handed toddlers — and existential shame from me
Mere months before, I’d been a respected (well, kinda) assistant-chief sub-editor of the Derby Evening Telegraph, able to kill cub reporters’ stories with the mere click of my mouse. I was pals (well, kinda) with the editor, the most powerful man in the city, I went to front page meetings to plan tomorrow’s news. I sat on leather sofas, I could say “fuckit” and “bollocks” whenever I felt like it and people laughed at my jokes even when they weren’t any good. I wore a tie. And now what had I become?
I was a little teapot English teacher, glorified children’s entertainer working for peanuts in suburban Japan.
Fast forward 17 years, and here we are today. We — my wife and I — stopped doing the playgroup when Covid 19 swept through and we haven’t felt the need to restart it, but its effects have been nothing short of miraculous on our language school.
I may have been slow to get over myself back when we started, but hindsight is 20/20 and I can see the benefits of my little teapot years. Let me show you:
The weekly playgroup itself rarely generated much profit — the first visit was free for newcomers and we charged each kid after that a one-coin fee (¥500). Our costs were ¥1,000 to rent a dance hall for an hour a week and a negligible amount for tea bags, paper cups and hot water.
But each Friday we’d get between five and 20 mums and their pre-schoolers. Call it an average of 10 a week. Sure, most people were returners, but we’d get a handful of new mums a month, say about one a week on average, attracted by word of mouth and the promise of a free first playgroup lesson.
That meant we had direct contact with 50 new mums and their children a year. And we did this playgroup for over 10 years — so a total of over 500 mums and 500 kids, possibly many more.
The playgroup taught us how to deal with kids and mothers, and got our name known through the neighbourhood and further afield. The mums would refer their friends and their husbands to me to sign up for English lessons.
But the real value was in the community, how the mums and kids would get to know my wife and me, and each other.
How was that valuable?
Because we were a community, when their kids turned three years old, many would sign up for a weekly English lesson with us. And most would stay through kindergarten (for three years) and on through elementary school (for another six years). A few more would stay through junior high school (for three years) and some stayed through high school (another three more years) and beyond. When we first started we charged ¥6,000 a month for weekly lessons. So how valuable was the playgroup to us?
All things considered, every playgroup kid who stayed with us had the potential to bring in ¥1 million or more over their lifetime at our school, all because I was not too proud to be a little teapot. And from that beginning, we have been able to lead our own life, independently teaching English the way we want to, and that really is my cup of tea.
This is not my latest Hana Walker teen mystery graded-reader short story, but it is my favourite: Hana Walker and the Time Machine sees our heroine going back in time to help out famed author Natsume Soseki. It's free today on all Amazon sites including Japan here, .com here and .co.uk here.