I made this slideshow from the pictures I took of the new baby between August 16th and August 24th. She has her beautiful eyes closed in most of them but if course I still think she is adorable. Then again I am a bit biased I guess.
This is my first attempt at making a Japanese music video so I decided to stick to something I know. Green public phones! The song is in Japanese but I added subtitles to the video. It’s weird but I hope you find it funny.
Want to know what’s cool for little kids in Japan? Right now it’s a bug that likes biting people in the butt. This Oshiri Kajiri Mushi (Butt Biting Bug) is the star of a song that hit the top 10 in Japan and became an instant children’s classic (until the next one comes along). The song is crazy but insanely catchy.
Many of my students, both boys and girls, have pencils, notebooks, toys, erasers, etc. with this guy’s image on them. And if there is a class with students I just can’t seem to connect to, sometimes I will sing a few lines of this song and just watch their faces like up. “Teacher knows Oshiri Kajiri Mushi, he must be cool!” Because to a six year old, there really is nothing cooler than this.
The other day I was at a convenience store and I saw the Oshiri Kajiri Mushi on a package in the snack food aisle. The product was called “Oshiri Pie” in Japanese, which literally means “Butt Pie”! In what country other than Japan does that sound like something you would want to eat? Yeah, I bought some.
On February 3rd I celebrated the Japanese holiday of Setsubun with Misako’s family. Setsubun is a very old celebration that takes place at the change of lunar seasons. Long ago this was the Japanese New Year’s Eve. Like most Japanese holidays, there is a certain amount of ritual involved. And like most Japanese holidays it seems very strange to non-Japanese.
This video was taken back in 2003 and is one of my favorite video clips ever. I was working for USA Summer Camp and we were staying at a facility in Saga Prefecture, which is in the north of Kyushu and right by the ocean. There was no swimming planned into the schedule but the students begged for a chance to play on the beach during their breaks. The staff agreed to let them on the sand as long as they promised not to go into the water.
I don’t know how to explain this one. If I wasn’t there filming it, I wouldn’t believe it was real. Alex, Misako, Fumiyo and I were at the bowling ally in Nakatsu. Before bowling we decided to try some of the arcade games. One game involves you kicking a punching bag as hard as you can. The game will then display your score. We were having a good time with that and decided to film it with a digital camera. Misako’s turn came and I captured an incredible aerial trick. As amazed as we were by what happened we were not nearly as shocked as my students who were bowling at the time and just saw this shoe come from nowhere. It’s now about four months later, but they are still talking about it. They say “Shoe! Slam dunk!”
In November I posted the student movie The Cursed Book. It was such a fun project and one of my best memories with last year’s class. I would now like to share the “out-takes reel”. These are the bloopers and gaffs from the filming and it shows, possibly better than the movie itself, the great time the students were having making their short film. I hope you enjoy it too.
Here is the first movie that my students and I made during our “English Time†sessions last year. We met for 25 minutes a day for two weeks and had one 2 or 3 hour filming session. In this time the students learned how to use the equipment, write the script, practice and film. I spoke to them only in English and I believe that this was the most useful aspect of the project. In order to know what to do and how to put the movie together, they had to work on their communication skills. Not their grammar, not their test scores, but real, useful English.