August 11, 2002 - 11:15AM
Wes Ehrlichman

Yesterday I caught Pokemon with a bunch of elementary school kids. You may not think that Pokemon exist, but here in Japan they do. Keep reading.

A couple of days ago my Supervisor Mister Yamaguchi asked me if I would like to spend Saturday Morning playing Nature Games with the Elementary School kids from Kedouin. He made sure to tell me that I didn't have to if I didn't want to, but it might be good for me to get to know the kids. I like kids and decided that I wanted to find out what I would be getting myself into when school starts in September.

Mister Yamaguchi picked me up at my house at around 8:30 and he dropped me off at the bus that I would be riding to the park with the kids. I got onto the bus and was joined by two seven year old sisters who sat together in the far back of the bus. We waited for a few minutes and then went to the next elementary school where we picked up two boys and a few more girls, then another school where we picked up 6 or 7 more kids for a total of 11 or 12 kids.

On the bus I listened to the kids' conversations, trying to pick up what Japanese I could. I'm pretty sure I could understand more of what the kids were saying than I can their adult counterparts. This is probably because their knowledge of Japanese is at a much lower level.

There was a boy sitting in the seat behind me that didn't seem to have any friends on the trip. I turned around and asked him his name and his hobby. He said he likes games. What a surprise! A Kid who likes games that doesn't have any friends. I told him that my hobby was TV Games (Video Games), and asked him what his favorite TV Game was. He rambled off some strange ten Japanese words in a row name that I surprisingly had never heard of. I had him repeat it a few times, but none of it sunk in. Then he started asking me questions.

For some reason I could understand it when the kids were talking to each other, but when he started talking to me I had no idea what he was saying. All I could do was look confused and say "Wakaranai" (I don't understand). Oh well.

When we reached the park we all sat down in a circle and introduced ourselves. The teacher that was in charge of the nature games then went into a short speech asking the kids to do something. All of the sudden, all of the kids closed their eyes and looked like they were preying. What had I gotten myself into! Was this some sort of Shinto ritual? I closed my eyes too and started preying, but to my god.

Then everyone opened their eyes and the teacher pointed at his nose and explained something to the kids. He then started naming off things. I recognized a few words here and there. "Blah blah blah, Inu," he said. Inu means dog. I looked at a few of the kids and they pointed at their noses as the instructor had said. He went on again. "Blah blah blah, yon ashi dobutsu," he said. That means four legged animals. A few more kids pointed at their noses. I caught on and decided to point at my nose this time. A few kids noticed the confused look on my face and started laughing.

The teacher went on and I figured out what the prayer session was for. I'm pretty sure what it was was he had asked the kids to close their eyes and use their ears and noses to listen and smell nature instead of seeing and touching it. Then he asked what they had smelt and saw. I'm not totally sure about this, but it is somewhat logical.

Then the teacher brought out a bunch of cards with animals on them. He clipped these cards to the back of everyone's shirt facing away from them with a chip clip. He clipped one on me and the other teachers as well. For this game he had the kids ask each other some questions to the other kids in order to try to figure out what animal they had on their back.

For example, one girl with a frog on her back asked me what color she was and I said green, then I asked her what color I was and she said white. The next girl who had a cat on her back asked me what sound she made and I said "meow meow," then I asked her about my animal and she said "KookaDoowaDoo" or something like that and I figured out that I was a rooster.

At any rate, this game got me thinking. When I finally get in the classroom it's going to be really hard to come up with a new interesting game every day to teach the kids English with. I may be able to come up with something like, "Hey what's the name of that CAT on your back," but it's going to be hard to keep a class going the whole time when they think cat is spelled Katto. I guess I'll just jump that hurdle when I get to it.

Again, I was totally lost when the next game began. This game consisted of looking in a set of bushes to strategically placed things that didn't belong in nature. For example, there was a 10 yen piece on the ground, a stuffed toy of Anpan Man, a popular Japanese Super Hero, and a wooden Pikachu standup.

I didn't notice until I got to the end of the line, but at the end, each of the kids was telling the teacher something. I assumed they were telling him something that they saw in the bushes so I said "Pikachu."

The teacher responded by saying something like, "is that all you saw?!" I didn't understand this either, so I didn't respond. Apparently I was supposed to count the number of things that were out of place. Oh well.

When this game was over, the kids all ran around the park and found bugs. As I was standing talking to one of the teachers one of the girls started pulling me away to look at one of the bugs she'd found. I went to where she pulled me and kneeled over to look at it when one of the boys jumped on to my back. I stood up and gave him a short piggy back ride. It looked like the kids were starting to warm up to me. Either that or they were starting to hate me a whole whole lot.

Let me just say that the amount of cool bugs that these kids found is staggering. Here are just a few:

The one in the upper left is dead I think. The girl in the lower right told me that "He came out of his hole so he has become sick." Yes I understood that in Japanese. It made me feel like I was a Japanese expert.

With all of the big inspection I started to think about what I had read in an interview with the guy who created Pokemon when it was first brought to the US. He had said that something he had really liked to do when he was a kid was look at and collect bugs, and when he made Pokemon he wanted to capture the fun of collecting bugs. "Gotta Catch em' All." Get it. Anyway, I was thinking that his childhood must have been a lot like what we were doing yesterday. Running around a Japanese park looking for bugs.

It wasn't just the kids that were doing stuff during this free time. One of the teachers taught me how to make a little boat out of a leaf. We both made boats and raced them down the stream. Mine turned upside down almost immediately, but here is his.

Then it started raining for the first time since I've been in Japan. Correction. It started pouring. Almost immediately after we had gone down into the woods we had to run back up and find shelter. It was fun though, running with the kids and watching everyone get soaked.

When we got up out of the rain it was time to leave so we walked back to the bus and headed home. I'm really glad I took my day off to play with the kids. It ended up being one of my favorite experiences in Japan so far!