My cousin Mayumi has taught Japanese at a public high school in Indiana for twenty-one years. When she left Japan at 24, her father didn't come to the airport. He'd seen American high schools on the news. After that, he called her every Sunday. Same question every time. "Are they behaving?" And every Sunday, she gave him one true thing that happened that week. He would listen, say "Sō ka," which means "Is that so," and hang up. Twenty-one years of Sundays. Some of her answers: 2005. "Nobody can say Mayumi. So they call me Sensei. The football team calls me Coach Sensei. I don't coach anything." "Sō ka." 2008. "I bowed once when a student handed me his homework. Now every student bows when they hand in homework. The seniors teach the freshmen. Nobody remembers who started it. I did." "Sō ka." 2011. After the tsunami. "My students held a car wash for Japan. In March. It was 34 degrees. They washed 61 cars. Some of the cars were already clean. People came anyway." A long silence. "Sō ka." 2016. "A boy laughed at my accent. A girl in the front row turned around and said, 'She speaks two languages, Colton. How many do you speak?' Colton speaks about half of one. He's a very nice young man now." "Sō ka." 2019. Her mother died. She flew home for two weeks. When she came back, her students had been teaching the class themselves. A senior named Destiny wrote the lesson plans. The substitute sat in the back and took notes. "Sō ka." That was the year her father started living alone. Then 2020 came, and nobody could fly anywhere. One Monday, Mayumi told her class the truth. Her father was 76, alone in a quiet house in Japan, and she couldn't get to him. A wrestler in the back raised his hand. "Can we call him?" So, with the principal's blessing, they did. Monday morning in Indiana. Monday night in Japan. Conversation practice. Her father's first answer was no. "They are dangerous." He was on the screen ten minutes early. In a necktie. In his own living room. Mayumi had never once seen him wear a tie at home. He has worn one every Monday night since. He asks about their grades the way farmers ask about rain. He told a six-foot-five wrestler to sit up straight. The wrestler sat up straight. He has been sitting up straight for four years. Somebody heard Mayumi call him "Otōsan." That's what Japanese children call their father. Now about two hundred American teenagers call him that. He has never corrected a single one. And when he says "Sō ka," thirty kids in Indiana say it back. Loudly. The seniors printed T-shirts. The front says SŌ KA. The back says nothing. "That's the whole message," they told her. This spring, at 82, her father did something nobody in our family ever expected. He flew to Indiana. First time on a plane in his life. Sixteen hours. Necktie the whole way. On Monday morning, he walked into her classroom. The room is built for 32. Eighty-one people were in it. Current students. And grown-ups, standing along the walls. Former students from every year. A nurse. Two soldiers. A man who drives a snowplow. Colton, who now teaches English. Destiny, who now has a baby. Every class for twenty-one years had known about him. The old man in Japan who checked on them every Sunday. A student at the front called out the way Japanese classrooms begin. "Kiritsu. Rei." Stand. Bow. Eighty-one Americans stood up and bowed to her father. Then a big man by the window stepped forward. Tanner. Thirty-seven now. A lineman for the electric company. The first boy who ever called her Coach Sensei. His son was in the front row. He said one sentence in Japanese. He'd been practicing it for weeks, in a truck. "Otōsan. Bokutachi wa, chanto shite imasu." Father. We've been behaving. Twenty-one years of Sunday questions. He had never heard the answer from them. Her father tried to say "Sō ka." He couldn't finish it. So he said the only English sentence he had practiced on the plane. "Thank you for taking care of my daughter." Tanner shook his head. "No, sir. She took care of us first." Her father nodded slowly. Then he told Tanner's son to sit up straight. On the drive back to the airport, Mayumi finally asked him. Why he never came to see her off, all those years ago. He looked out the window at the cornfields for a long time. "If I had come," he said, "I would have stopped you." He still calls her every Sunday. America, the news keeps telling you your kids are lost. That they're always on their phones. They are on their phones. Every Monday for six years, some of them have been on the phone with an old man in Japan who lives alone. He used to ask if they were behaving. Now he asks how his kids are doing.

The Houthis seized Mayun Island, also known as Perim Island, in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, according to various reports from the region. The small volcanic island is strategically important because it sits inside the strait and divides the waterway into two shipping channels. Control of Mayun gives the Houthis a significant position from which to monitor and potentially threaten commercial vessels transiting between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The seizure comes just one day after the Houthis captured the strategic port city of Mocha and as their forces advance toward Dhubab on the Yemeni mainland. Together, these gains put the Houthis in a substantially stronger position around one of the world's most important maritime chokepoints.

tripleS Birthday LIVE🎉 with Mayu 🗓️ 05.12 18:00 KST #tripleS# #트리플에스# #トリプルS# #トリプルエス# #トエス# #Mayu# #마유# #マユ#