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Published: October 17th 2007
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Eri and I pose as characters from an old Japanese novel taking place in the Dogo area in Matsuyama city. The regional competition for the junior high school English speeches was last weekend in Matsuyama, a city about two hours south of me on mainland Shikoku. If you were reading my blogs at this time last year, you will remember that I went to this same competition last year with my student Emiko who left victoriously with second place. No such luck this time, although I thought at least one of the two students whom I went with should have won second or third place. I'm not just saying this because I have a biased opinion about my students. I genuinely think that the competition results were unfair.
The girl who won first prize gave a speech that was obviously the best, but, suspiciously she came from the same junior high school that the boy who won first place last year came from; a private school. Private schools often have native English speakers as their main teacher in class everyday. This is not the case at the schools I work at. I visit different schools a couple times a week and there is a native Japanese speaker who teaches them English the rest of the time. Also, private schools often
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the back of Dogo Onsen bathhouse have classes on the weekends too. These factors alone give private school students an unfair advantage over the rest. Therefore, I definitely think there should be a separate contest or at least separate categories for public schools and private schools. As for the second and third place winners, their pronunciation and maybe even their speech content was not as good as my students! I'm infuriated!
However, all was not lost. Eri (the Japanese teacher of English), Ikue, Akie (my two students), and I had a really fun time in Matsuyama. Eri drove us down there the day before the competition and we spent the night there. So, we had plenty of time for fun and going to delicious restaurants. I annoyed everyone on the drive down by proclaiming myself D.J. and singing along every word to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Of course none of them had ever seen "Wayne's World," so they didn't find it as fun as I did. My two students eventually got bored with me and fell asleep in the back seat.
In Matsuyama we stayed in the historical area called "Dogo." This area is home to Matsuyama's only claim to fame, Dogo Onsen, a very
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This part of the bathhouse really reminded me of the bathhouse from "sentochihirono kamikakushi" ("Spirited Away") because of its sliding doors and detailed verandas. old hot spring bathhouse. And for those of you who saw the Miyazaki film "sentochihirono kamikakushi" ("Spirited Away"), the big bath house in that movie was supposedly modeled after Dogo Onsen. At first glimpse the bathhouse doesn't resemble the one in the movie much, but when you pay attention to the details you can see the similarities. We also did some shopping and went on a hunt for my favorite socks store that we eventually found. I went on a socks shopping spree while we were there. It's funny going to cities with my students here because I realize that I know more about Japanese city life than they do (since I studied for a year in Osaka, the second largest city in Japan, and they hardly ever leave the little island of Yuge). We went to a Baskin Robins (thank you globalization!) which my students had never been to before, and we ate Indian food for dinner, which my students had never tasted before. A fun time had by all I think!
Another thing that happened recently in the Inland Sea was the Kamijima music festival. Kamijima is the town I live in consisting of four islands: Yuge,
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me, Akie, and Ikue in front of Dogo Onsen bathhouse Ikina, Iwagi, and Uoshima. Each of these islands used to be separate towns until three years ago when they merged. The island of Iwagi has an annual music festival where they invite all the musical groups and clubs from the town to play a pre-show leading up to the main professional act they get to perform every year. The professional act for this year was a famous band from Okinawa called "Begin."
So, as I am a member of the local mandolin group, we were scheduled to play that day on an outdoor stage at the Iwagi port. The mandolin group asked me to play a few solos on my fiddle as well. The weather was looking sketchy all morning, and sure enough, minutes before we were about to go on stage, it started raining. It wasn't raining hard, but any rain at all is bad news for wooden instruments. You'd think whoever plans a musical event like this would think about that before they decide to put up a stage with no roof. So, I thought, "Oh well, so much for our performance, but we have no choice in the rain." Yet, as I thought this, everyone was
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These are little stickers called purikura that can be made in photo booths in Japan. I used to love getting these stickers made when I lived in Osaka, but now that I live in Yuge where purikura doesn't exist, I get really excited to make them when I go to big cities. walking up onto the stage with their mandolins. At the same time I heard the announcer introduce us and say that there would be an American playing a few solos on her violin. I had to run up to our conductor and tell him there was no way I would bring my fiddle out in the rain. I told him I would play the songs on my mandolin instead (as my mandolin is actually just borrowed from another member of our group who didn't seem to care). It was a bummer, and people definitely seemed disappointed, but I really had no choice.
Aside from the absense of my fiddle solos, the rest of the performance was pretty bad too. The music from a mandolin doesn't carry well outside, especially not in the rain, so nobody could really hear us. On top of all of this, our sheet music was flying everywhere from the wind. It was a slight disaster. However, the show was saved by the next performance of a rock group from Uoshima starring Ethan, the English teacher on that island.
The actual main event, "Begin," was great. The band is made up of three extremely talented
shima510
I couldn't resist the Halloween sundae at Baskin Robbins. It was delicious. musicians. They use a mix of traditional Japanese instruments, western instruments, and some instruments that they created themselves to play everything from rock n' roll, pop, blues, bluegrass, country, and traditional Japanese music. Their trademark sound is created with the traditional Okinawan stringed instrument called a sanshin, which is a precursor to the shamisen, the instrument I am now learning. The performers said when they originally started performing as a group, they never played the sanshin, but everywhere they went people would ask them if they are from Okinawa, why don't they play the sanshin? So, they decided to try it out. It was the strangest thing having such a big act come to such a little place in the Inland Sea, but I'm glad they came.
Another big act that decided to grace the little islands’ presence recently was the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra. This is a major professional orchestra from the big city of Hiroshima, and they came out to the island of Yuge to play in the Yuge junior high school gym and accompany a song that the students sang. Why? The Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra has a program every year where they pick rural schools in Japan
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Ikue, Akie, and Eri riding on the trolly in Matsuyama (something that doesn't exisit in most Japanese cities) where the students don’t have the opportunity to see a classical music performance, and many students don’t even know what the instruments in an orchestra are. Yuge junior high school was one of the lucky schools picked for this year’s program. Not only did the orchestra play several pieces from famous composers such as Tchaikovsky and Brahms, but they explained the different characteristics of each instrument in the orchestra, they let students come up to the conductor’s podium and try conducting the orchestra, they accompanied a song that the students had been practicing for months, and they even played the Yuge junior high school song.
I realized that I took my exposure to culture such as live orchestra performances for granted growing up. Since I grew up in a university town, I always had the opportunity to see the university symphony orchestra perform for free. So, I just assumed my students here would at least be able to recognize orchestral music and instruments. However, when I first came here and started playing my fiddle in my classes, it was the first time my students had ever seen this instrument. I was really surprised, so I am very happy that
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Akie giving her speech about the importance of appreciating our hometown the Hiroshima Symphony orchestra has this kind of educational program for students in rural communities.
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