When I taught at a boys high school in the early 1980s, I would, without fail, catch a bad chest cold in the winter and lose my voice, sometimes for weeks on end. Ever tried to teach five classes of rowdy teenage boys while only managing to whisper and utter the odd croak? The first time it happened to me, I was terrified of losing what little control I had. I was overdosing on throat lozenges, pacing the room to cow troublemakers and, when all else failed, slamming books and heaving erasers. Hell, I decided, is not being able to project beyond the first row. I finally quit the job, quit that lozenge addiction and have never looked back.
Seigo Yoshioka (Kenji Sakaguchi), the hero of Ryuichi Hiroki's "Kikansha Sensei (Locomotive Teacher)" has it even worse. A stab to the throat in a kendo match has rendered him mute, ending his budding career as a teacher in late 1950s Hokkaido.
As the film begins, however, he is on a boat headed toward a small island in the Seto Inland Sea and a new job teaching at the island's only school. His mother, an island native who left three decades before, used her old friendship with the school principal (Masaaki Sakai) to help get him the job, but now he is on his own, knowing little of what awaits him.
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