Update From Japan!

Hello Friends & Family!

For those in America, I hope that you all have a nice Thanksgiving later this week! As you might expect, there is no Thanksgiving in Japan but we do have a national holiday (no school) coming up on Tuesday and the 6th grade classes at my school are taking a school trip to Kyoto, Nara and another city on Thursday and Friday of this week. So this combination means a slightly less loaded school schedule for me in the next few days.

I am hoping to find some small projects at school to fill the time - one thing that is relatively common at Japanese schools is that the English teacher will create an "English Board" which is a bulletin board that the teacher decorates with different themes and English vocabulary. That might be something that I end up working on this week in my free time.

This week was fairly normal after a busy last weekend hiking in Kyoto. The teachers at my regular school invited me to play softball with them on Saturday (yesterday). At first, I thought that it was just going to be us playing a game within ourselves but after we had a practice on Tuesday evening and I received more information about the event, I found out that we were actually playing two games against the staffs of other Kobe elementary schools.

There was a bit of ceremony to the event, even though some of the play itself was not too serious. An "opening ceremony" kicked off the events during which we received information from the event organizer and we did a coordinated group exercise (with all the other teams). During the first game that happened right before ours, I think the teams were a bit mismatched so some teachers on the teams did some things to try to make their teams laugh.

You can get a sense of what it was like from this video I took of the game before ours. As you can tell from the video, this particular team was not too serious. But, yes, you can see that the batter is wearing a Yankees Mickey Mantle jersey.

Our team had a wide range of talent - some teachers obviously struggled with playing but wanted to be part of the team, while others were decent players. Everyone (about 19 or 20 or of us) batted. When we finished the first game, we started the lineup for the second game with the batter after the last out of the first game, so players roughly received equal number of at-bats. I played second base in the first game and then moved over to first base. There was a home run fence and I hit one over my first at-bat, but popped out the next several times at bat (the teachers were really excited about the home run). There were umpires (even base umpires) and a chalked field.

On Sunday, I watched some local high school baseball. From what I have heard, school baseball teams will play year round. The key season is in the summer leading up to the Summer Koshien tournament (the link will take you over to JapanBall, where I wrote an article about my experience at the tournament). The team I watched on Sunday plays close to where I live and has been to Koshien in the past, as I understand.

I shot a few videos during game play which you can see here -

• ​Mid Game - in this video you see the home team doing some field clean-up between innings about mid-way through the game. They cleaned up the infield and re-chalked the lines and home plate. Also notice how the whole field is dirt, even the outfield!
• ​During Game - here you will see some in game action. What I noticed was how much the teams talk during the game. You can also hear the announcer - it is normally a girl student, you will also hear Japanese version of English words used for the positions (shorto for shortstop, secondo for second base, firsto for first base, etc.). Also the team departing the field leaves the ball right on the pitching mound during the changeover.
• ​After the game - before leaving the field, the visiting team bowed to the home team (home team is near the 3rd base dugout). The teams also repeated this when the visiting team's coach left the field (he left the field shortly after his team did). The home team bowed to the visiting team and vice versa. If you listen closely you will hear a gruff "arigatou gozaimashita" (thank you very much) thrown out before the bow.

Softball and baseball aside, I once again visited music class during the week. I may have mentioned this earlier, but when I have free periods at school, I am able to visit other classes. While nothing particularly interesting happened during this class, we did watch video of their music concert, which they had a recording of from various camera angles. I found the level at which 6th grade played music impressive - the songs they played were from the opera Carmen all without any sheet music to which to refer. If you are unfamiliar with Carmen, you can catch a taste of it here. The first three minutes of that video is what the 6th grade played. You will probably recognize the melodies even if you did not know it was from Carmen.

I do not have any photos to share from this week, but I am hoping to see some more fall colors either on the national holiday or next weekend - will update you once they are available!

Until next time,

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I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.