Today was so much fun.  On one of the first days I was here, my otousan told me that on the 3rd of October we would have a welcome party for me.  I got to invite four people from the program to come and we would have a party.  I was largely kept in the dark about what was going to happen at this party, except for the fact that we were going to try and barbeque stuff.

Well it happened today, and it was awesome.  I was woken up at 10:30 (later than I had intended to wake up) by my otousan who asked me to clean my room a little because we would be showing it off later.  I frantically cleaned up my room and put away my laundry because I could already hear people downstairs.  First surprise: there were ten other Japanese people there besides my family.  Scary.  But I was given a reprieve and backup when I was told to go pick up my friends from the train station (it’s a minute walk away).

I frantically emailed my friends asking if they were there yet, and I received varied responses: one was late, the others were almost there, the other had apparently already gotten to my house (how she managed to get to my house a minute after I left it astounds me because it’s impossible not to run into someone on the way from my house to the station).  I waited for the two who were on time and escorted them back to house.  There, everyone introduced themselves, and, first cool thing of the party, we each chose a pair of chopsticks at random, and on the paper wrapping was written our seat assignment.  This rapidly became irrelevant when I got a text from my friend who had arrived at the station and had promptly gotten lost.

I went out to find her and managed to figure out how she had gotten lost, and caught up to her.  We got back to my house rather quickly and we joined the others, who had already started to eat.  Now, my house doesn’t have a garden; it has what I would call a small back patio.  On this patio, several tables had been set upin an arrangement of two clusters.  In each of these clusters, nestled in the tables, were grills, similar to the kind of grills that you get at korean b.b.q. places, where you put the meat on the grill and cook it right there.  So several people at each table would put on meat and vegetables and squid and fish on the grills and put the grilled meat into dishes and pass it around.  It was fabulous.  Just, agh, meat.

I ate a large amount of meat and we finished up just as it started to rain, which ushered us all inside.  For a while cleaning up of outside happened, which I helped with a little, but nobody asked for help and everyone seemed to be so coordinated and so into helping that I felt like I would be intruding if I tried to help.   As soon as that was done, my otousan went into a room I have never seen before.  It’s a traditional style room with some tatami and a low table and stuff, and it was my first time seeing it, which my friends found amusing.

He began pulling out a lot of stuff, and he also pulled out bingo.  I got excited, because we were playing bingo.  Bingo is so much fun, and you so rarely get to play it.  Oh, and there prizes.  I was one of the first few to get bingo, so I had a good choice of things, and some of them were really nice.  What I walked away with ultimately: pokemon hair ties.  One of them has a plastic pokeball and pikachu on it, and the other has a plastic bulbasaur and pokeball.  AWESOME.

After bingo, what did we do?  Oh.  Ohhhhhh that’s right.  So, after bingo, a performance space was set up, and the first act was one of my host family’s friend doing a magic act.  I think she was still learning, or hadn’t been doing it for very long, because there were one or two hiccups, but some of the stuff she did was really cool.  That’s when my okaasan said, and this is paraphrasing, “there’s another act, but before that, Kelly (one of my friends), would you like to sing?  Simon, would you like to sing?”  Terror seized my body as I was put on the spot and thought “oh jesus, were we supposed to prepare something?”

My okaasan had mentioned something about singing at the party and I thought she meant would I sing anything in the format of karaoke?  I gave a mild affirmative thinking “yeah, I’ll think of something,” not realizing that this was what she meant.  Luckily, the idea of a duet had been brought up earlier in the party (at that point I had still thought it would be in karaoke form) and I had thought “well, we never did bohemian rhapsody that one time.”  I asked my otousan if I could hook up my iPod to the stereo system so we could have some accompaniment, and, thank the technology gods of Japan, we were able to do so.  Kelly introduced herself, and we began.

I would like to take a moment to thank one of my best friends, Greg.  Back in Oberlin last year, for the entire year I took improv classes which were taught by Greg.  They were some of the most fun I’ve had at Oberlin and they taught me a lot and probably account for a large portion of how I interact with people today, because, as Greg once said about himself (I think) which I now hold as true for myself, the lessons and rules of improv have bled over into my social life and (paraphrasing over, more or less) social interaction is just one big improv scene.

It is because of my improv education and hanging out with cool people like Greg that this turned from awkward song into awesome song.  Instead of standing there singing along with the song, not really doing anything, after about 10 seconds of the song, I improvised, using the lyrics as my inspiration.  I kneeled down before Kelly, I raised my hands to sky, improvised a gun, was very dramatic, I let my hair down, headbanged during the guitar solo, and was generally very silly.  That’s what made this experience one I will probably remember for a while.

It occurred to me after that, while my friends found this highly amusing, I have no idea what the Japanese people in the room thought.  I guarantee you that none of them knew what the lyrics mean, and most if not all of them had never even heard the song before.  Imagine a drunk salaryman doing karaoke and doing weird things on stage and not knowing why the fuck he’s doing it.  Well, I can only imagine what the Japanese in the room thought, but maybe it was something like that (not that I was drunk or anything, I wasn’t).  Afterwards a couple of them said to me that it was…interesting, or that my singing was good (something I’m not really convinced of, I’m insecure about my voice), but it’s obvious that they did not really understand what was going on.  An interesting look at different cultures.

After this silliness, Kelly really stepped and sang a song completely out of the blue, a cappella and everything, and she has a nice voice, too.  After that, there was a hula performance, which was very relaxing, and pretty.

After the hula, I think we played some actual karaoke, there was some wii tennis, some wii bowling (I lost the first match, won the second one), and desert.  After that, my okaasan came over with a bag.  The bag had five pieces of paper with names on them, and said something to the effect of “presents.”  Each of my friends and I chose a piece of paper at random from the bag, and one of my friends (can’t remember which one) was the first to receive a gift from one of the people present.

This was very flattering and one of those situations where you don’t really know what to do.  I mean, these people hardly knew us and they were giving us presents, it was just so nice of them.  Two of my friends got some really nice cloth to wrap stuff up in, one of my friends got a really nice fan, and another got a cool little box.  I ended up receiving three things: one was a little good luck trinket, which is a little cat that’s smiling and has his paws raised.  The second was a larger smiling cat plushie, holding a bag of money in one hand and a gold ryo (the currency that was used in Japan until the Meiji restoration) in the other that I can put on my bag and stuff as a good luck and wealth charm-type-thing.  The last thing I got was a nice piece of cloth that can function as a headband, neckerchief, thief’s hat, and other things.  The cloth itself is green with an image in white of a bunch of smiling cats on a pirate ship.  It’s so cool.

After this gift giving there was another round of pictures (oh yeah, pictures were taken more or less at all times) and that’s when the party started to wind down.  I showed my friends my room, and we hung out there until it was time for them to catch the next train.

All in all it was a great day, and it really made me feel welcome, to think that my host family would go through this effort on my behalf.  I’m going to really try to hang around my family more often, because they’re really cool, as was evident today.

I was thinking about the language, and I’d like to think that I’m getting better, but I’m going to push myself a little.  I mean, nothing too serious, but I could look over the grammar I learned last week to make sure I know it, look over the kanji, the vocab.  I could look over the stuff in Genki I learned a couple weeks ago, the vocab in there, and I could maybe look over a new lesson.  I promise I won’t push myself too hard, but I want to get better >:3

A theme of this week has been exhaustion.  With a field trip coming up this week, I want to be not-exhausted so I can walk around and see and do cool things.  Oyasumi~

~Shimon