Sunday, November 16, 2008

This week- costumes

This week in Japan everyone buckled down and really spent most of the time memorizing our various skits or speeches that we had to speak/perform in Japanese. The three middle level Japanese classes all wrote and preformed skits, while the top class and the newbie class kids had to write ten-minute speeches. My upper class friends were none too thrilled with this prospect, especially since they were given so much liberty with the speech topics.

Saturday was the day of “Ha-pyo-ka-i”(presentations) so Friday I spent the day buying skit supplies and memorizing skit lines. My years of slacking in theater always come in handy when it comes to skits because I can learn skit lines fast. Also when we were rehearsing our skit my inner-director reared its head when I started yelling at people to rotate their bodies towards audience. My bizarrely controlling side comes out when I am stuck in groups that are leaderless and directionless. My class’s skit was about a Japanese ghost that kept haunting JSP students because the ghost used to be a teacher. We all wanted to write a ghost story and I picked the teacher theme, and it was admittedly cheesy but I figured drinking and being bad students was a fairly universal theme. Especially in Japan. And also that is what JSP students are renowned for. I played a narrator with my friend Eva and I think our skit went over pretty well. The “Hapyokai”’s last for about three hours so my host mom told me she was only going to show up for my skit, which I understood because three hours of bad Japanese is a lot for anyone.
The D-class speeches ranged in topics from food - To superstitions.



To topics that were too advanced for me to understand. But I think this one
Involved a strict teacher.



Also heavily featured in this years skits were people dressing up as pop culture references. We had an anime character from a kind of old anime “Dragon Ball Z.”
Dragon ball z



And then Ash from Pokemon.


And then there was a man as a woman gimmick.




And my favorite was Quin as Barack Obama.




Jen was pretty set on drinking after the whole event (She was one of the upper-class kids with a ten minute speech. She was very bitter until it was over.) So a large group of us proceeded to an izakaya and managed to get pretty drunk on sake and beer. And then we all wandered over to the closest karaoke place and proceeded to drink a few more cheap cocktails. Naturally both places were no-mi-ho-di. Four hours of all you can drink is a very dangerous combination. Especially if you throw in the fact that we were all giddy about finishing the giant Japanese project. It was a fun night followed by a fay of me lazing around my house watching movies. Next week I hope to make a trip to a club and hopefully spend a full night in Tokyo without worrying about catching a last train.

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