At first glance, the page looks like something recovered from an archaeological dig.
Mysterious symbols cover the notebook. Red Roman letters have been written all over them. At the bottom sits a teacher’s note and a cute character stamp.
Then you decode it and discover that the actual essay is a completely sincere reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Structurally, the situation is almost perfect comedy:
Packaging: ancient-looking runic manuscript
Content: earnest reflection on the value of everyday life
Grader: a homeroom teacher who somehow completed a three-and-a-half-hour decryption job
What makes the story linger, though, is not only the joke. There is a strange kind of care in the teacher’s response.
1. What happened
In June 2020, photos of a school essay written in runes—and of the teacher’s red-pen decoding—went viral in Japan.[1]
According to contemporary coverage, the assignment said that the essay could be written in something other than Japanese. The student apparently took that permission very literally and used runic characters mapped to Latin letters. Rather than simply rejecting the paper, the teacher separated the symbols, wrote corresponding Roman letters, and reconstructed the text. The teacher reportedly spent about three and a half hours on it.[1]
The final feedback, in substance, was:
- the content was actually good;
- please write normally next time;
- the “good job” stamp was for the teacher’s own effort in decoding it;
- and the teacher would like overtime pay.
This is less “grading” and more “post-operation report from the cryptanalysis unit.”
2. This was not an essay written in Old Norse
A little precision makes the joke even better.
Runes are writing systems historically used for Germanic languages. The Elder Futhark contains 24 characters, and its name comes from the sound values of its first six runes.[2]
But the student did not translate Japanese into an ancient Scandinavian language.
The method was closer to:
Japanese → romanization → rune substitution
For example, a Japanese word could be written in Roman letters and then each Latin letter replaced with a roughly corresponding Elder-Futhark-style rune.
Cryptographically, that is closer to a simple substitution than an advanced cipher. Once you know the mapping, the text is recoverable.
The brutal part is the labor. Doing that for an entire handwritten page means repeatedly mapping symbols, finding word boundaries, and reconstructing Japanese. The theory is simple. The workload is not.
3. The content being sincere is what makes it unfairly funny
The decoded passage is not a joke.
From the visible text, the student reflects on how a small virus created a worldwide crisis, on not forgetting the experience, on the importance of ordinary daily life, on recovery for infected people, on remembrance for those who died, and on hoping for the return of normal days with friends and teachers.
So the actual formula is:
Maximum nonsense in the submission format; model-student sincerity in the content.
That makes it hard for the teacher to stop halfway and say, “This is ridiculous. Redo it.”
There is a real essay on the other side of the puzzle.
4. “Write normally” works as a punch line, not a shutdown
The teacher could reasonably have required a rewrite immediately.
Instead, the teacher read the whole thing first.
Then came the equivalent of: “Please write it normally next time.”
That distinction matters.
This is not unlimited permissiveness. The teacher clearly communicates that the format imposed an unreasonable burden.
The play is accepted; the boundary is also stated.
That combination changes the tone. The response does not read as a lecture so much as a return serve.
The student launches the “what if I submit this in runes?” ball at full speed. The teacher spends three and a half hours chasing it down, throws it back, and essentially says, “Caught it. Next time, use a normal ball.”
Of course that becomes a memory.
5. The character stamp adds a tiny piece of ordinary school life
At the bottom of the page is a “good job” style character stamp.
The image alone does not establish the exact product, the teacher’s favorite character, or why the stamp was purchased. We should not invent that biography.
But character-based grading stamps are a real product category marketed to schools and teachers. Pokémon evaluation stamps, for example, are currently sold specifically with school and teacher use in mind.[3]
So it is not unreasonable to imagine:
Maybe the teacher picked a cute character because students would enjoy seeing it on their work.
That is an interpretation, not a verified fact.
Still, the image becomes warmer when you picture a teacher keeping a little “good job” stamp in a desk drawer for ordinary grading.
And in this case, the teacher effectively used it on themself.
That is excellent comedy.
6. Why does this feel like “love”?
Not romantic love, obviously.
The feeling is closer to paying a real cost to take another person’s silliness seriously.
The efficient response was available: “I cannot read this. Rewrite it.”
The teacher did not choose it.
Instead, the teacher spent time, figured out the content, marked the page, and returned the joke with another joke.
Time is a very legible signal. It tells the student: “I actually received what you did.”
But this does not mean that care equals endless unpaid labor.
Nobody should infer that a good teacher must spend three and a half hours decoding every prank.
The charm comes from the full sequence:
I went along with it. I laughed. It was also a pain. Next time, write normally.
7. Research agrees that relationships are not a trivial extra
A viral image cannot scientifically diagnose the quality of one teacher-student relationship.
Still, there is a substantial research literature showing that teacher-student relationships matter.
A 2025 second-order meta-analysis synthesized 26 meta-analyses, covering roughly 2.64 million students from prekindergarten through K-12. Teacher-student relationships were significantly associated with clusters of outcomes including academic achievement, academic emotions, behavior, executive functions and self-control, motivation, school belonging and engagement, and well-being.[4]
That does not mean “decoding runes improves grades.”
It means the broader relational environment—whether students feel seen, supported, and connected to teachers—is not just decorative.
Humor is similar. A 2025 research review concluded that instructional humor can affect attention, motivation, emotion, relationships, and learning, but its effects depend strongly on relevance and appropriateness. Hostile or inappropriate humor can backfire.[5]
A 2023 study of 367 students also found that perceived course-related humor was positively associated with teacher-student relationship quality and student engagement. Because the design was observational, it should not be treated as proof that humor directly caused those outcomes.[6]
Research cannot stamp this individual teacher “loving.”
But it does show why the mix of responsiveness, humor, and relationship quality is worth taking seriously.
8. The good part is not “a teacher who allows everything”
There is a subtle mistake in turning this story into “Great teachers let students do whatever they want.”
This teacher was clearly inconvenienced.
It took hours.
The teacher explicitly said the student should write normally next time.
The overtime joke makes the cost visible.
That is precisely why the interaction works.
Silently absorbing every burden is not the same as a good relationship. You can join the joke and still say, “That was a lot.”
This response contains three things at once:
acceptance, a joke, and a boundary.
That is probably a large part of why people read it as care.
9. Conclusion: the format deserves a warning; the exchange deserves a place in memory
The student spotted a loophole in the assignment and sprinted directly toward runes.
The teacher could have taken the shortest route: “Redo it.”
Instead, the teacher somehow spent three and a half hours following the student into the maze.
At the end of the maze was an actually decent essay.
The teacher read it.
Then told the student to write normally.
Then used a “good job” stamp almost as self-congratulation.
The student committed fully to the prank; the adult committed fully to receiving it; the adult still won the final punch line.
This is not an efficient educational method.
It should not become a standard workload expectation.
But as a one-time interaction, it is extremely powerful.
Next time, write normally.
This time, though, both of them probably created a story worth remembering.
Sources
- grape (2020), Japanese report on the viral rune-written school essay grapee.jp
- Store norske leksikon, “runer” / “futhark snl.no
- Kodomo no Kao official store, Pokémon school/teacher stamps stampripple.com
- Emslander et al. (2025), “Teacher-student relationships and student outcomes: A systematic second-order meta-analytic review pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Zhou & Lee (2025), “Teaching and learning with instructional humor: a review of five-decades research and further direction pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Lu'mu et al. (2023), “Perceived related humor in the classroom, student-teacher relationship quality, and engagement pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
