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Published: December 4th 2006
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Eri and Emiko on the Shinkansen headed towards Tokyo.If you recall, one of my junior high school students won the regional (Ehime Prefecture) English speech competition a couple of months ago. This means that she was able to go to the national speech competition in Tokyo last week. Actually, the full name of the competition was, “His Imperial Highness Prince Takamado Trophy 58th All Japan Inter-Middle School English Oratorical Contest.” The title is a bit ridiculous, I know.
Prince Takamado actually died this past summer, so the contest is now hosted by his wife, Princess Takamado (from Japan’s royal family), and is sponsored by the Yomiuri Shinbun (one of the biggest international newspapers). The Yomiuri Shinbun paid my student’s way to Tokyo, and the English teacher I work with at the junior high school was also getting her way paid by our board of education so that she could support our student.
I was a bit jealous from this because I had been coming to the junior high school every day after I was finished with work for months to help my student practice for these contests. But I had accepted that I would have to stay in Yuge while my student and English teacher had fun in
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Eri got her breakfast brought to our room every morning at the ryokan. Unfortunately, since it was all meat, I had to go find my own breakfast. Tokyo, until my junior high school principal suggested that I ask the board of education if I could go too. What a great idea! I was really worried about asking my supervisor at the BOE about this matter, and put it off for a long time. After all, this trip would cost almost one thousand dollars (including shinkansen tickets and hotel fees for five days in Tokyo), and asking my BOE to spend an extra thousand dollars on me was a little nerve-racking.
Finally I decided to ask my supervisor and tell him that I would pay my own way if necessary. As expected, when I asked him, he replied, “Sore wa……mmm…chotto muzukashii ne.” Meaning, “That’s a difficult question.” So we had to go sit down and have a proper conference with my boss and coffee. After a lot of discussion, they decided they would have to ask the mayor. Geez. Thankfully, the mayor of Kamijima is one of the nicest people I’ve met here. So, a few days later, I got word that the mayor had Okayed the proposal, not only to allow me to go to Tokyo with my student, but to fully pay my way there
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Emiko and me in front of the Yomiuri Shinbun building. and give me paid leave from work. Wooohoo!! Tokyo here I come!
So last week I packed my bag for a five day stay in Tokyo. It wasn’t my first time in Tokyo, but it was for my student which was pretty exciting. It was, however, my first time on Japan’s famous shinkansen (bullet train). At first I didn’t think it was all that great. It did seem to go faster than the regular trains in Japan, but not that much faster, and it mostly just made it difficult to get a good look at the towns we passed by out the window. But when we made it to Tokyo in a little over three hours, I was impressed. I once took a bus from Osaka to Tokyo (a much shorter distance…Osaka is about halfway between Yuge and Tokyo), and it took me eight hours. This time I was going twice as far and it took less than half the amount of time! When the train stopped in Osaka and Kyoto, I had the urge to jump off and visit my friends, host families, and school that I went to there, but I didn’t think my BOE would be
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Our hotels were really close to Tokyo University (the best in Japan), so we checked it out one morning. In this photo Emiko and I are standing in front of Tokyo University's famous red gate at its entrance. You can't tell, but we're both making nerd faces (hahaha). very happy about that.
Anyway, we arrived in Tokyo as it was getting dark and Eri, the junior high school English teacher and I took our student to her hotel before getting lost trying to find our own. This was the first of countless times Eri and I would get lost in the very same neighborhood. Our hotel was a traditional Japanese Inn called a “ryokan,” which I didn’t even know existed in Tokyo. It was really nice for the price.
The next day began with a group picture of the students, teachers, and Princess Takamado. Before the princess arrived we were all put into position depending on our hight. Eri and I were standing a couple rows behind a row of empty seats until the people in front of us realized Eri was shorter, so they let her trade spaces with them and move up. Then they realized that I was with Eri, so they told me to move up too. Just then the Princess walked in and everyone had to stop what they were doing and applaud her arrival. As the princess and some other VIP made their way to their positions in the photo, we
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Tokyo University's campus. Pretty nice. Studying here is like studying at Harvard (very expensive and hard to get accepted). realized the empty seats had been saved for them. Then the princess sat down right in front of Eri and me! So we got our picture taken right behind Her Imperial Highness! Of course this was a photo that you had to preorder, which neither one of us had. Luckily, our student had ordered it, so when it comes I will surely be getting a copy made.
Then the contest started and we had to sit through seemingly endless speeches about everything from global issues such as war, starvation, and pollution, to more personal stories about family, hometowns, and weaknesses. Many of them were really interesting to listen to, but after about twenty or thirty speeches, it becomes difficult to pay attention, no matter how interesting the topic is. And, as this day was still just the semi-finals of the competition, some speeches were difficult to understand. But not my student’s speech of course! In fact, when they announced the winners of the semi-finals, I thought her speech was just as good as many of the winners’. But, unfortunately, my student did not make it to the finals. After all, there were over 150 students, from which they only
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The three hillbillies of Yuge standing in front of Asakusa's gate. The people in yellow jackets were making origami and giving them to people for free. How nice. picked 27 for the final competition. We did our best though. My student was really upset and cried the whole way home. Once again, I felt like a soccer mom cheering up her child after a rough game. She kept apologizing to me because she said I worked so hard to make her speech good and she had failed me. Well, that was ridiculous, because if it wasn’t for her working so hard on the speech, I wouldn’t have been able to take a wonderful trip to Tokyo.
Miraculously, she was as good as new by the next morning, and we had a full day of free time to have fun in Tokyo before the final competition the next day. So Eri, our student, and I visited many of the major sights. We started at Asakusa, the most famous temple in Tokyo. Most of our time there was actually spent shopping in the souvenir shops that lead up to the temple gate (tourist trap!). The temple itself was really beautiful though.
After that we took a short subway ride to one of the biggest outdoor markets in Tokyo called Ameyoko. This market had all kinds of Japanese and
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The row of souvenir shops leading up to Asakusa temple. foreign goods at really cheap prices. Eri and I bought matching bags with Showa-era-style (80’s style) prints on them. Then on our way out a man at a candy shop was standing on a stool throwing loads of delicious foreign chocolate in bags and yelling “1,000 yen!” (about 10 dollars). There was a crowd around the man almost throwing 1,000 dollar bills at him to get their bag of foreign chocolate. So, of course we decided to join them. It was a great deal though, because we split the cost three ways and still had a lot of chocolate for each of us.
Finally we went to Harajuku, one of the popular shopping districts, especially for the younger crowd. I had been here before, but thought my student would really like it. We ate at an Italian restaurant and got crepes from a street stand (Tokyo is supposedly famous for crepes, and I always thought they were French).
The next day we went to the final competition. None of us were really looking forward to it since we were still bummed that we didn’t make it to the finals, and we didn’t want to have to sit through
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A shop selling Japanese wooden clogs. any more speeches! But, it ended up being more than worth it to go. The speeches were absolutely amazing. It reminded me of those kinds of movies like “Spelling Bee,” where all the kids are geniuses and their life is spelling difficult words. This competition was like the English speech version of that movie. It was hard to believe that many of these kids hadn’t at least lived in an English speaking country before. Some of their accents were so perfect, I would have mistaken them for an American or Australian if I didn’t know they were Japanese.
But not only were their accents right on, their topics and speeches themselves were truly inspiring. One speech, titled “Our Disability,” (the third place winner) even made me cry. Eri and I, both being college graduates were inspired to go back to school and do something amazing to help the world. We both left the contest that day with new views on our lives and loads of new ideas of what to do with our future. Eri said, “I want to be someone famous in the future!” which pretty much sums up the feeling. Our student was inspired too, and is
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For anyone who saw the movie "Memoirs of a Geisha," this must be where they bought her shoes for the dance scene. These sandles are enormous! How could anyone walk in them? already deciding what to write her next speech about. It was easy to picture all of the contestants being future leaders of the world. They all had such bright futures ahead of them and so many opportunities. Unfortunately, this is partly because most of them came from private schools. In fact, out of the seven winners picked from the finalists, only one was from a public school, which I thought was completely unfair. They should have different categories for public school students and private school students.
After the contest was over a big, fancy reception was held at the Imperial Hotel (the nicest hotel in Tokyo), hosted by the Princess herself. So we got to wine and dine with Her Royal Highness and a lot of other VIP. Every time the princess walked in the room they would play some royal song and announce her arrival, which was our signal to stand up and be quiet. She wears the prettiest hats that remind me of something Jackie Kennedy would wear. The Yomiuri symphony orchestra also played at the reception which was nice. And, they gave out the prizes for the seven final winners of the competition. I knew there
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Emiko and me in front of Asakusa temple. had to be some kind of prize for all the hard work that these kids had put in to their speeches. I had heard that the seven top winners would get a two week trip to England which sounded like an awesome prize and one that was fitting for this particular contest. But no, that was only the icing on the cake. The first-prize winner received one MILLION yen (maybe 10,000 dollars?)!!! And the second and third prize winners also received some huge amount of money. All of the seven winners got MD players, new computers for their schools, and presents for all of their classmates too! They must have spent a fortune on this competition! But, money well spent. The contest is such a good motivator and a wonderful opportunity for all of these junior high school kids. I kept thinking, I wish I had this kind of opportunity when I was in junior high school. I wasn’t even able to take a foreign language at my school. Of course, if I had had an opportunity like this, I probably would have been too stupid to take advantage of it. Like I said before, these kids are future leaders
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There is a big pot in front of the temple for burning insense. It is always smoking 24/7. Supposedly if you waft the smoke from this pot in the direction of something you want to be better, it will be so. For example, most people fan it in the direction of their head to make them smarter. But my knee was killing me at the time, so I fanned it on to my knee. For some reason I got a lot of strange looks because of this. of the world.
That night our student went back to her hotel with some of the other students, and Eri and I went out for a night on the town. Eri has some Japanese friends in Tokyo whom she met when she studied abroad in Boulder, Colorado, so they all speak really good English. We went out to a restaurant with them and had a good time speaking in three different languages (since her one friend’s girlfriend is Chinese). The next day we bought Tokyo Banana (a Tokyo specialty cake that coworkers almost expect to receive when someone comes back from a trip to Tokyo) and we were on our way back to our little part of the world, Yuge.
Going to Tokyo really allowed me to step outside of my life in Yuge, out of the daily routine of teaching classes and focusing all of my attention on my next lesson plan, out of the tiny island where everyone is either a child or retired. I was able to take a look at my life from an outsider’s perspective. I realized that on Yuge I’m so distracted with my day-to-day work life, that I haven’t been able
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A beautiful mural on the ceiling of the temple. You can't tell from this picture, but it was quite large. to think about why I’m even here, or how long I’m going to stay here, or what I’m going to do in the future. These are all difficult questions, and unfortunately I’m not really sure what the answers are. I guess only time will tell.
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the gerry
non-member comment
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Quite the experience jennie. An incredible read and I'm glad that you were able to take part in it. That is a once in a lifetime chance and i'm sure many other JETs are envious of you. I sure am! Maybe I can train my student to be one of the select few... if he studied outside of school that is!