Thoughts

Well, it has been a while, and for the most part I've been busy.

I'm getting ready to sleep and felt that it might be handy to do some writing to everyone as to an update.

These past couple of weeks have been fairly busy for me. I competed in a Japanese speech contest last Sunday, and swam in a swim meet on Saturday, so I'd been spending quite a bit of time practicing my speech and swimming.

THE SPEECH!

The speech contest was fun in all honesty. There was some Australian lady with a terrible, terrible Japanese accent, but really good Japanese, that gave a talk about the "heart" of Japan. I didn't catch most of it as I left to practice my speech. The Wife mentioned that she said some very interesting things about the nature of Kata in modern Japan. I forget the actual phrases, but she mentioned that in modern Japan the idea of Kata, or the form of something, with form for forms sake. Thus most things were being executed quite inefficiently and without heart, or so I recall. You'll have to ask her about it. Anyway, speech contest went pretty good. Two of The Wife's students gave speeches in English. The guy slurred all his words together and was utterly incomprehensible, though his speech showed an excellent amount of thought. His topic was on the nature of the Japanese constitution in lieu of sending members of the Self-Defense-Force to Iraq. The Japanese constitution says that their military units can only be used in country to defend it. He was concerned about the press of militarization of his currently peaceful country.

As far as I can tell he knows the "real" histories of W.W.II and not what is usually taught (most Japanese textbooks don't mention anything about Nanking, some even suggest that the Chinese welcomed them into their country to protect them).

The Wife's other student, I don't know her name, gave a speech about not losing sight of Japanese culture in an attempt to become like a western nation. She didn't suffer from incomprehensibility, so I didn't have to read her speech to know what she was talking about. She thought that being involved in an international environment called Japanese to recognize and attempt to understand the outside world, but at the same time, understand itself. A pretty good speech all in all.

The only other student giving an English speech talked about the Japanese bathing customs and how foreigners should understand them. I didn't think the speech was very strong, but she had very good pronunciation.

Those judges that were judging on content, felt that The Wife's female student had the best speech, but they were over ruled, meaning the speech contest was merely a measure of pronunciation, and being under the 5 minute time limit, which The Wife's students were not.

The Japanese section of the speech contest was what was really amusing. There were 5 of us, a 26, 25, 22, 14, and 9 year old. So judging I could tell would be interesting to say the least. The 26 year old had been in Japan a year, me, a year and a half, and the 22 year old seven years I believe. The 14 year old came to Japan when she was 5 and had grown up in the Japanese school system, and the 9 year old had been born in Japan. Needless to say, the 9 year old and 14 year old spoke perfect Japanese, of course, they were "nonnative" speakers because they weren't Japanese themselves. As Forest and I were talking, Forest mentioned, they wouldn't even count me as a Japanese, and I recalled a story that we found fairly early on in our stay. Japan likes to proclaim internationalism, and so they champion that fact whenever they can, like "Chinese man becomes head of local PTA," but what you don't see in the headline is that his family has been living in Japan for three generations, both his grandparents and parents had been living here for quite some time. So, even this Chinese man, probably could have competed in the contest. Anyway, even though I lost to the 14 year old and 9 year old. I was pleased with what I did, and had a fun time of it. It was a very good experience. The End.

THE SWIM MEET!

This was by far the most bizarre event I have participated in for quite some time. Everything started at 10:30 PM on Saturday and went until 2:00 AM Sunday. We started with chain walking, where five people had to walk together in a chain. That went on for a half hour, then the continuous swim began, and from 11:00 until 1:30 we were swimming in a relay. My team did okay, we swam 11100 meters, which isn't bad considering the fact that most of my team could not swim a contiguous 50 meters. The top team swam 13200 meters, and they were the local Jr. High and High school swim team, so I'm not at all ashamed of what my team did (I mean when 80% of your team is 50 years old, you just can't expect to keep up with a team of youngin's that swim 4 hours a day). I will say that I outswam most of the people there, with the exception of one coach, who, if I can ever beat I will be very happy. At midnight they turned off all the lights and we had to cross the pool wearing glow stick micky mouse ears. That went on for a half hour, then back to the swimming. Afterwards there was a party and I didn't get home until 3:30 in the morning. I generally enjoyed myself. While we were swimming people would talk to me, but at the party I sat alone for most of it, I was one of the first people to sit down at a table and no one sat next to me :( After some people started to leave, my team invited me over to sit with them and I talked with them a bit, in both Japanese and English. A man gave me advice, "Because your wife is sleeping, she will not be happy if you disturb her when she comes home." And one of the guys was a textile trader and I actually understood a joke.

OTHER!

I was quite worried that I would be swamped and I've been quite dilligent in trying to maintain my schooling this week, but it turns out that I didn't need to fear, a programming project has been pushed back another week so I can do that this coming week.