Friday March 10, Japanese students from Fukuoka visited our school for the first half of the day. Their school is our sister school, so I guess every two years or so the students visit each other alternating countries. Anyway, there were about 100 seventeen year old Japanese students at our school for the first half of the day. It reminded me in some ways about the Austrians coming to Cannon Falls, about Kaori, and about me when I first arrived at school in Seoul.

Many of you may not know, but usually Korea and Japan do not like each other very much. Koreans especially have harsh feelings towards Japan because of the Japanese Rule over them for most of the first half of the 20th century. (Read the next blog for the history) After the Sino-Japanese War, World War II and the Korean Civil War ended, the Korean people stopped teaching in Japanese at their schools and the language, although still taught began to be percieved as a far lower priority in what students should know. And in Japan, the Korean language isn't taught rigorously either. The important language for both groups of students to learn is English. Usually the two groups of students probably wouldn't have wanted to try to get along very well, but they were the hosts and guests invited on a special occasion.

A group of about ten Japanese students joined each of the ten second year classrooms. When the students entered my classroom, they gasped to see me, an American sitting in their midst. (I was used to it. There are new first years at school now and they are the same way) I just said, "Hi, welcome, my name is Kimberly" and invited two of the boys to sit down at the group of desks where a few friends and I were sitting. The conversation started with "Hi", "What is your name?" "How old are you?" and "Do you have a girlfriend?" then it stopped. I had just gone back in time six months and these two boys were Torie and me. There were being asked the same questions. They had the same amount of understanding for the language. And if they were confused, they basically only had each other to talk to in their native language to try to understand. There was one korean girl who understood and could speak japanese decently and she resembled my host sister for these boys, so she could help if they were really lost.

Conversation picked up after awhile. A pulled out my electronic dictionary which has korean to japanese and japanese to korean along with my japanese textbook and paper and pencil. I understood the situation pretty well and the materials helped. I know that for me sometimes it is better to write things than try to pronounce, because pronounciation can be confusing and sentences can get pretty long. So some of the things we wrote. I worked best as a translator, sometimes from english to english, because the accents might be a little confusing and a native speaker would be best to understand. That means I also had the chance to speak with the Japanese boys the most and talk about things like sports and actors.

When a group of highschoolers that can't speak to each other in deep conversation due to language difficulties are placed in the same room and told to "get to know one each other" all nationalities I've met so far are so similar. We're all just highschoolers. We played games like Rock Paper Scissors and other hand games. Boys challenged each other in arm wrestling matches. We used our hands and pictures to talk and sometimes we just observed.

For lunch we ate japanese/korean curry. That really reminded me of Kaori, because the first time I ever ate it is when she made it ate my house in Minnesota. It's my favorite school lunch and it's also both Korean and japanese food. One of the side dishes for the meal was this fruit salad that is actually apples, banana, manderin oranges, tomato, and a few other things in something like sweet mayo. I don't know if it's actually good at all or if I'm just used to it. But the boys asked me what it was. I said fruit salad? just try it. That reminded me either of Kaori or myself when I first got here, because you don't know what you're eating, but just try it.

After lunch they left. They didn't have email. Japanese isn't as wired as Korea or the US. (Korea is actually the most wired country in the world) But I did get their air mail addresses, so hopefully soon I'll write some letters. I want to try to do some of it in Japanese, even if it's just simple hiragana.