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I was just minding my own business. Today was a beautiful Sunday and I was practicing tea ceremony at a lovely teahouse named Horaikan. This is a typical Sunday afternoon for me. As I was nearing the end of my second run-through, my teacher was called from the room. It seemed urgent. I was told to just keep practicing. I finished the rest of my ceremony and then waited. But it didn’t look like she was coming back. Curiosity finally got the best of me and I went to investigate.

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In various teaching books I have come across activities where students can fill in a caption to a picture or the word bubbles for comic books. These are suggested for high school students due to the difficulty in creating original stories. But I still wanted to give it a try with my jr. high school classes. I knew I needed to use something familiar to them but also encourage them to create their own dialogue. I decided to take a few panels from the popular manga (comic) series Doraemon, and see what my students would come up with.

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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.

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I have been seeing the video, “The Japanese Tradition: Sushi” all over the Internet. It looks, at first, like a serious instructional video on how to buy and eat sushi, but when you actually watch, you begin to realize that it is a spoof. I have watched this video many times and founf myself wondering weather it was made originally for a western audience or for Japanese viewers. The premise of the video is to introduce the concept of sushi to foreigners who would not understand it’s traditions. Along the way the video “over orientializes” the Japanese people for the sake of comedy. But who was it made for? I have shown it to both Japanese and Western people and everyone has found it very funny. It was bothering me so I decided to do some research.

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