August 27, 2002 - 8:58PM
Wes Ehrlichman

I just got back from something called the Houtokugakkuen Natsu Matsuri. Natsu Matsuri means summer festival, and the Houtokugakkuen (which I'm pretty sure I'm spelling wrong) is a place in Kedoin where the kids whose parents aren't around stay. That's how it was explained to me at least. It's like Kedoin's orphanage. I'm really happy that my town, as small as it is, has something like that. If this were America I imagine that they would probably just send them off to a bigger city. It seems like Kedoin, as small as it is, has a lot of money floating around. A lot of this is probably due to the hotel and golf course, which probably do extremely well at least twice a year. I'm hypothesizing though.

Only half of the point of today's journal is this Natsu Matsuri festival though, and I'll get to that later, the main point is that today I really felt like I made a connection with some of the kids. I had my first real conversations with a few of them.

This girl's name is Lisa. Yes, Lisa is an American name. Apparently her real name is Risa, but there's another Risa in class so she wants to be called List. Fair enough, it's easier for me to remember. I asked her them for advice on what learning games they liked to play in the classroom, and she said they liked the line game. I guess David Maroni (the guy that was here before me) played that game with them almost every day. I think I'll probably play it a lot too, but I also want to mix it up and throw a few other games in there too. We'll see how it goes when class starts though. I tried asking Lisa a few questions from the textbook and she did pretty well, so I think I'll probably study a list of things they are supposed to know and develop classroom discussion around that.

While I had my camera out I tried to take a picture of the most elusive student of mine. Here are the results.

As you can see I got pretty close, you can see her eyes in two of the pictures and the back of her head in the other one. I'll get you yet!

Part of the reason that I spoke to so many students is because I spent a lot of the day sitting at my computer writing a short introduction about myself for some school newspaper and was asking them for help in translating it to Japanese.

This girl's English was unbelievable. I think her name is Naomi, but I could be wrong. I've met a lot of students. Her dad teaches English and she had been to California on a month-long homestay. The thing is, I've been in Japan for a month now and my Japanese doesn't seem to be as good as these kids' English. I think the main thing that a homestay trip to California taught her was not to be afraid to make mistakes when speaking English. I say this because although she probably helped me more than anyone else on my introduction paper her friend, who stood right next to her the whole time, helped her when she didn't know the answers. The friend seemed to know about as much English, but said barely anything to me. Probably because she was afraid to look bad in front of me.

So today I learned that these kids know much more than "Hello, how are you? My name is..." Naomi's not the only one who's done a month long homestay in California either, it seems at least 1/4 of them have. As much as these kids know, it's also amazing how much they don't know. It sometimes takes them a long time to put together a simple sentence. I want to teach them that it's ok to make a mistake so that they can have faster conversations, even if the faster conversations make a little less sense. I've made at least one mistake per sentence I've said in Japan, and I still get my point across most of the time. I should spend a little bit of one day teaching tongue twisters. That would be fun.

When I went to the festival I talked to more students from the elementary school. Everyone at the festival would coming right up to me and try to speak to me! This one kid was obsessed with whether or not I had a girlfriend. Every other sentence was about it. He seemed really cool though, so it was OK. He too has done a month long homestay in California, so his English is pretty good, not to mention his fashion sense.

I also met a ton of cool girls. It probably seems that I've been talking to mostly girls. I think this is because in Japan, as in the rest of the world, Guys concentrate much more on athletics than academics, and since I'm not exactly very athletic I identify more with the more academic girls. Then again it could also be that the girls think I'm cute!

Elementary School Kids

The Elementary school band kids had a concert at the festival. They sounded really good for being in elementary school. When I was in Elementary school I never even figured out how to play that stupid recorder they made us buy.

Middle School Girls

The middle school kids are going to be students of mine, I'm pretty sure. Can't say too much about them except for that the spiky haired kid above is really into them.

High School Girls

The High School girls on the left played in a band tonight as well. They sounded really really good. Like, almost professional. I talked to them for a long time and each one of them took their picture with me using the camera on one of their cell phones.

College Girls

The College girls are both welfare majors, and they were there taking pictures of the students they help as part of their major. The girl on the right told me that she wanted a foreign boyfriend. Yowsers! Too bad I've got a girlfriend already... Too bad for her :-) (I know I've used this joke already, but I have to use it again, sorry)

I also saw tons of cute kids! Here are a few of them.

I think that all Japanese Festivals have Hanabi (fireworks) and this one was no exception. Because this was a small festival though the fireworks were volunteer only, they were freaking AWESOME though. I think I definitely enjoyed these fireworks more than the expensive Imuta lake fireworks. First of all, they were shooting these off about 50 feet away from me, and they were all low flying fireworks. One of them was a large disc about the size of a Frisbee that flew up into the air and started to fall down, but started spinning again and flew back up. When it finally stopped spinning a flaming disc flew to the earth, no doubt catching something on fire. What a cool firework!

This small firework set even had a small Niagara falls. The difference was, this one was hanging from a string directly over people's heads and the sparks were falling right onto them. That's how I pictured it anyway, I never really got close enough to see. By the end of the firework set I couldn't see a thing because of all of the low flying smoke. It wasn't a windy night and all of the smoke kind of lingered. The whole thing just seemed very dangerous. Now that's the way to do fireworks!

You may have noticed that my camera is working. Well it works about half the time. I would have probably shown twice as many pictures here if it were more consistent.