The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

This weekend I helped run a gasshuku, a weekend training conference thingummy, for a bunch of Natori jr. high school students who are going to Sooke, B.C. next March. What a lot of fun that was! Tiring as heck, but fun. They're all super excited of course, which was a large part of the fun. We played all kinds of juvenile games, so the students (who are from 6 different junior highs) can get to know each other better and be friends when they go to Canada, and so that they have games to play with the Canadian kids. We played Morpork Game, a drinking game I learned in Japanese club. In Morpork Game, you put your fingers over your eyes like glasses, and flick your hand to the right with a "woop" sound when you are "it", to pass your "it"ness along to your right hand neighbour. Or you can pass it to the left, but if you change directions you ahve to use a different hand motion and sound. It is a very silly game, and the kids liked it. After that we played the similar but apparently funnier "ai shite'ru" game. In that game, you can either say "Ai shite'ru" (I love you) to the person to your right, or "ee?" (what?) to the person on your left. Then they pass it to the next person. The kids thought it was hilarious. We played it three times and they still wanted to play it more. To increase the complexity we added multilingual rules where you could answer in English or French and pass it around in different languages, which was also fun. "I rub you!" "What?" "I rub you!!" "Quoi?" "Je t'adore!!!"

We also, of course, did the chicken dance. That's a given. The biggest challenge, but one that went over very well, was teaching the kids to sing Stella-stella-olla. That's a clapping game, where a clap is passed around a circle to the rhythm of a nonsense song, and every round the circle gets one person smaller. I was pretty impressed at how well the students learned the song, it was a lot of fun. A few of the girls had me write it down so they can teach their friends - so Bill, if you find your masuchu girls singing stella-stella-olla, that's my fault.

I managed to learn the names of most of the people there, which for me is an enormous achievement. That means I can refer to 10 more of my students by name, assuming I don't forget in the time before I see them again. That is a pretty big assumption I am afraid. What else... well, we ran a roleplaying session. Unfortunately it wasn't the kind I would like to teach my students, but I don't think they are quite up for pencil and paper yet. I played the homestay father, and we had a brief dinner conversation about what the students' families did for a living and what school in Japan was like. That was fun, because of course Japanese students don't know what is interesting about Japanese schools. It was odd to have to tell them what their school life is like, from an outsider's point of view. I drew a (pretty nice, if I say so myself) picture of a Western-style bathroom and made sure my kids knew basic etiquette, like the fact that our bathrooms don't have waterproof floors with drains in the middle so the kids can't go slopping water everywhere. I also gave a very brief runthrough of some of the weirder taps we have, like those single-dial kind that turn on as soon as you rotate them a bit. Some kids are familiar with them from hotels but enough were not that I think it was a good plan. It is really weird, trying to think of mundane aspects of Canadian life that a Japanese jr. high student might not expect. Things like not standing up and leaving the dinner table as soon as they're done eating!

One of the most fun parts of the weekend was talking about gifts. One of my stronger memories of when Yuto came to homestay with my family is that he brought widely varied presents: some cool decorative stuff for my mom and sister, but for me an adidas sweat towel and for my dad a bunch of golf ball soaps on a rope. Yeah, soap on a rope. Dad laments that it was on a rope: golf ball soap itself could have made a pretty good prank for golfer friends, but it was ruined. To prevent similar minor cultural mishaps, we brainstormed gift ideas; I told the students that even though sports are popular in Canada as well, it isn't a good idea to bring sports gear because we have the same stuff - unless they bring sendai/natori area special things, like a Rakuten Eagles banner. Even that I discouraged a little but it depends on the homestay family. I suggested they look for stuff like Japanese dishes, snacking foods that are more traditional (like mochi!), perhaps use their own mad skillz to make some Japanese calligraphic art for wall hanging... I think any canadian homestay family would be very impressed to get shodo (calligraphy) work made by their homestay student as a present. In the same vein we talked about making origami art that could be transported (paper chains and things) or bringing paper and teaching the host family to do basic origami, a great ice-breaker. Other great ideas included Japanese folding fans - I can't believe I didn't think of that - and traditional woodprint art, ukiyo-e. Once the ideas got flowing the students had some great ones I couldn't think of on my own, but I am not going to list them all because I have to keep some for myself for next time I visit my family!!

Of course, I also said with a nudge and a wink that of course they couldn't bring japanese sake, because they are in Jr. High, but it would sure be cool to bring some of the local brands if they could. Sigh, too bad. I suspect several of the boys in particular will skirt around the age disability for that one, but who can say at this stage. It's definitely an option for the chaperones too.

Now I'm home, freshly showered, and bloody tired. I am proud of myself: I conducted my parts of the seminar almost completely in Japanese! The students are getting English tutelage separately, and we wanted them to focus less on English and more on culture for this seminar. It was nice to be able to talk about something besides grammar, and use my foreignness for a different purpose this time. However, spending the whole weekend entirely away from English is very tiring! So, of course, is wildly chicken dancing around the Yuriage Cycling Sports Center!!

Oh yeah, chicken dancing - that reminds me that yesterday we had a break after lunch to check out the cycling center. They have bicycle-car-things (pedal powered gokarts, essentially) for riding around a kind of gokart course: 1-man, 2-man, and 4-man versions. By the time I finished my lunch the kids had nabbed the 2- and 4-man ones, so I boarded a 1man and chased them down, humming james bond music and bashing my bike-car against the sides of theirs.

Observation: how can two athletic jr. high school kids not be able to use their combined power to go faster than me, an out of shape science grad half again their mass pushing a bike-car of almost equal weight? Anyway, the go-bikes were fun. Eventually I was let into the 4-man car, along with 2 of my icchu students and a girl from Midoridai (one of Bill's schools). We got it going really fast and played chicken with the 2-man car, driven by two nichu boys. Good times! The girls were screaming as though they were on a roller coaster, but not exercising their powers to use the brakes or anything so I suppose they must have been having fun. I sure was. Sadly, today it rained so instead of going outside for the same kinds of goofing off, we stayed inside and did the chicken dance, and I told stories about when I came to Japan when I was 14. What kind of Japanese people I met, what sort of things I thought were interesting, what kind of memories stayed with me, that stuff. I think the most important (ichiban daiji!) point I could make was to tell the students not to let themselves be quiet well-behaved Japanese people in Canada. That was where Yuto stopped having fun. A lot of them took it to heart: over the course of the weekend I saw a lot of very shy students making an effort to do goofy things they normally wouldn't. Tomoko, from Midoridai, put a lot of effort in in particular. (Is she normally outgoing, Bill? She certainly didn't seem to be on the first day!)

After the seminar I got a ride home with one of the chaperones, and he took me to a couple cool places. If someone could remind me to tell the rest of the story after Christmas, I will!