KYOTO, JAPAN — After spending his formative years in rural Georgia watching kudzu consume barns, telephone poles, and at least two of his childhood friends, 24-year-old ALT Cody Whittaker thought he had finally escaped the vine that stole his youth. He was wrong.
“I thought Japan would be different,” said Whittaker, staring blankly at the school entrance, where a hand-painted kudzu wreath frames the words Kudzu Elementary School: Growing Together, One Tendril At A Time. “I thought I was safe.”
Whittaker arrived at Fushimi Kudzu Elementary School eight months ago with a suitcase, a TEFL certificate, and a therapist-approved coping strategy for moderate vine-related trauma. None of it has held up.
The school features kudzu motifs on every surface, the gym floor, the cafeteria trays, the birthday cards the teachers make by hand. The school song, which Whittaker is expected to sing every Monday morning, includes the lyric: “We grow like kudzu, we reach for the sun, we cover everything until the day is done.”
The 240 students call themselves Kudzu-ko, or Kudzu Children. Each morning they perform a ritual hand gesture representing a vine unfurling. Whittaker demonstrates it with the thousand-yard stare of a man who has done it too many times.
“They make me do the vine hands,” he said. “Every day. Vine hands.”
The school’s patron deity, enshrined in a small sanctuary beside the third-grade classrooms, is Kazuragami, a local kami believed to protect the community through the sacred power of fast, unstoppable growth. Offerings of kudzu leaves are placed at the shrine each Friday. Whittaker was asked, on his second week, to help arrange them.
“I arranged kudzu leaves for a god of kudzu,” he said. “In Japan. After spending three summers helping my uncle burn kudzu off his property with a flamethrower.”
Principal Yamamoto Keiko described Whittaker as “a wonderful addition to our kudzu family,” noting his remarkable enthusiasm during the annual Kudzu Festival, where students weave kudzu baskets and sing to Kazuragami for forty-five uninterrupted minutes.
“He cried at the festival,” she confirmed. “We thought he was moved. We gave him extra kudzu mochi.”
It was not because he was moved.
Things reached their lowest point in February, during the district’s annual ALT training day, a full-day event organized by the city Board of Education, ostensibly to promote “cross-cultural collaboration” and “community engagement,” but which local ALTs have long described as “a holding pen with PowerPoints.”
This year’s theme was Green Kyoto: Celebrating Our Natural Heritage. Whittaker was assigned to a paired activity session. His partner: Thibault, a 26-year-old French ALT from Osaka, who arrived forty minutes late carrying a konbini coffee and the distinct energy of a man who had stopped believing in things sometime around his second year.
“They put us together,” Whittaker said. “Me and a French guy. For kudzu promotion. The BOE actually said the words: kudzu promotion.”
The task assigned to the pair was to create an international online presence for kudzu, something that would, in the words of the BOE handout, “share the beauty of this cherished local plant with the world.” They were given two hours, a school laptop with a French keyboard, and a printed photograph of a kudzu leaf for “inspiration.”
Thibault, who had spent three years teaching in Kobe before transferring to Osaka and described his current relationship with Japan as “complicated,” assessed the situation immediately.
“I told Cody: we do this in one hour, we make it look like we tried, and then we go find a vending machine,” Thibault reportedly said. “This is not our war.”
The result of their collaboratio, produced in approximately 47 minutes, including a 12-minute break during which Thibault explained at length why kudzu does not exist in France and therefore “is not my problem” — was the International Kudzu Fan Club, a website now accessible at https://kudzu.jpn.ovh/en/.
The site, rendered in what can only be described as the aesthetic vocabulary of a mid-2000s Geocities page dedicated to a regional Belgian football club, features scrolling yellow text on a navy background, a visitor counter, and a paragraph describing kudzu as “a vine native to Japan and China, now infamous worldwide.” There is a link back to the French version. There is no contact form. There is no fan club. There are no members.
“We submitted it to the BOE,” Whittaker said. “They said it was ‘creative.’ Thibault went back to Osaka. I went back to the school. The kudzu was still there.”
The BOE declined to comment, but forwarded a press release announcing that the International Kudzu Fan Club website had been shared on the city’s official tourism social media account, where it received three likes, one of which was from the account itself.
Whittaker is currently on a waiting list for JET Programme counseling services. His preferred session topic, per his intake form, is listed as: “plants, specifically one plant, specifically its presence in both my past and present life, and what that means, also possibly the French guy.”
He has seven months left on his contract. The kudzu outside his mind has already reached the wallpaper in his nightmares and dreams.
Shirogumi Shimbun reporter Tanaka Fumiko contributed to this report from beneath the school pergola, which is also covered in kudzu.
Leave a Reply