Blitz Shuffle: Yoshikawa

Blitz Shuffle: Season 2
Yoshikawa's background

It was a first for the unruly group. The teacher had managed to calm them down long enough to force them into a group project. She had forced them to sit their chairs in a circle and made them tell each other their life stories. The teacher reasoned that since all of them were going to spend the year together in Rudimentary Music, they should at least know a little bit about each other.

"I'll start." The teacher offered, glancing around the group. "My name is Ms. Cullen. I'm 43 and this is my first year teaching at Julian Academy, although I've been teaching for about ten years. I went to school it BHU and majored in music education. I live in an apartment with my two dogs, Rosco and Cootey, and I am an only child. See? That's not hard. Who'd like to go next?"

She glanced around the circle of students, trying to find someone who'd open up. Cushi-chan was staring at the ground, trying to avoid being called on because she was too shy to speak in front of such a large group. Although from Ms. Cullen's angle it looked liked Cushi was trying to bury her face in her large boobs. Dan-chan had pulled an extra chair in front of him, and had his feet propped up on it, and looked thoroughly disinterested. The teacher figured getting him to talk about himself would be like pulling teeth. She figured the same went for Takamata in the seat next to him. Takamata was slumped down into his chair, trying his best to ignore the girl on his left. Mimirou, of course, had seated herself as close to Takamata as she could. Ms. Cullen figured if she called on Mimirou she would get a long winded speech on Takamata's daily life. She'd learned her lesson with the in class essays. Who had time to read three pages on the science behind Takamata's awesome? Her gaze fell to Trappu-kun, the Lolita boy. He might open up, although she didn't know if she was prepared enough to discover why Trappu dressed like a girl. So that left her with Yoshikawa-san.

The young girl was busily kicking her legs back and forth in front of her chair, occasionally scuffing her non-dress code purple and zebra sneakers on the floor. Her hair was a bright yellow blonde and pulled into low pig tails that flared out dangerously at the ends. The cute girl was in remedial music for her countless dress code in fractions, and distaste for authority and structure. In comparison to other Academies, Julian was very relaxed with their dress code. Being an arts academy, they had to let their students have some creative freedom. The only requirements were that the outfit had at least one school color present and sported the school crest. Yoshikawa usually came to school with a skirt of the right color but with polka dotted short and neon tights underneath. And it was a cold day in hell before they caught her with the school's crest on her clothing. Her excuse was that she couldn't be branded by any one nation, not that any of the teachers understood what that meant. They couldn't kick her out because her parents paid for her to be there. She was by far the oddest thing Ms. Cullen had come across and she'd been teaching music for over ten years before she got hired at Julian.

"Yoshikawa? How about you?" The teacher asked, figuring the girl would have an interesting explanation for the way she dressed. "Tell us about yourself."

"Me?" The blonde asked, pointing her herself. "Okay." She chirped hopping off her chair to stand in the middle of the circle. "My name is Yoshikawa-san, and I am very weird."

"Tell us something we don't know." Dan-chan scoffed from his side of the circle.

"Lance Bass voices Sephiroth." Yoshi grinned, clasping her hands behind her back.

"Uh...Well...Y-yoshikawa, why don't you tell us about your parents?" Ms. Cullen suggested, trying to steer the conversation in the right direction.
"Well...my parents are bohemians. My mom paints and my dad works as an errand boy for an large company." Yoshikawa answered, swaying from foot to foot. "He met my mom on the street corner."

A gasp sounded from Cushi-chan, making everyone come to the same conclusion. "No no no, she was selling her paintings. See...my mom was born in America, but her dad was a military guy, so he got stationed in Japan and then they had a big falling out because she wanted to pursue painting instead of becoming a doctor or something. So she went into the heart of Japan with her paints, a couple of canvases, and all of her college money. She sold her paintings on a street corner close to a train station because a lot of people walked by there, and my dad just happened to walk by. He was a normal Japanese man who had an interest in American sub-cultures like my mom. When he saw her paintings, he was just taken aback by what he saw. I think the painting he fell in love with was this of a pair of hands with water running through it. It hangs above their bed. So, after falling in love with her paintings, he fell in love with her, and then they had me and the rest in history." She smiled at the end of her story, and pranced back to her chair to sit down.
"How do you know all of this?" Takamata asked, leaning toward her.

"My parents told me. They constantly tell me every chance they get. My parents are still very much in love, despite how different they are. With my mom, everything is an analogy about tree, nature, or the cosmos. My dad is a little more uptight but he still loves to talk about how we're all connected by some great artistic aura that pushes us to create beauty in one way or another." The blonde answered, twirling around a few times before she sat down. "That's why they decided to send me here, despite everyone here forcing me into a mold when the point of being an artist is being your own person and not conforming!" Trappu-kun put a hand on her knee and calmed her down in his weird, "my eyes never open" way. She smiled, taking a deep breath to calm herself. "Anyway...That's mostly why I'm such a difficult student. I don't do well with authority, structure or forced creativity. I came in here majoring in the ocarina and Native American flute, but they liked me so much that they had me playing at every Native American person who came to the school, and I just couldn't find love or joy in it anymore. If I don't want to do it, I'm not gunna. That's how I was raised."
"So now what do you play?" Ms. Cullen asked tentatively.
"My ninja star throwing tambourine, Tam-tam." Yoshikawa answered, smiling brightly.
"Maybe now's a good time for a lunch break...."