As promised, the Junten Easter party went ahead on Friday, only six days after Easter, and it was a bigger success than I think anyone had estimated. I think Matt, Barney and myself had agreed we were expecting around 60-70 students to arrive, although secretly I was a little more pessimistic, but I was quickly shut up when moving around inside the room became a huge, uniformed obstacle course.

We kicked off at 3.30, with what turned out to be the main attraction of the day – the egg painting challenge. Having spent about an hour on Wednesday blowing the insides of eggs out, I was eager to see this be a success – the stench of those eggs still haunt my dreams and I wanted to see something justify the years of counseling I’m no doubt heading towards.

…so…many…eggs…

Anyway. After a quick explanation of the rules, the kids got to work on turning boring white eggs into what happens when a chicken goes berserk in a paint factory. We set a time limit of around twenty five minutes, but in that time some of the kids really did create some amazing work.

In the end, however, there could only be one winner. Well, five actually. Matt’s mother had brought with her from England a load of prizes for us to distribute, which made the competition a lot more serious when the kids realized what was up for grabs. Second place went to an egg which was meant to be Mr. Wada, and English teacher at our school. It came very close to winning, but in the end it was defeated by the egg on the right of this picture;

Before I go any further, I have to point something very important out. At every single party we’ve thrown for the school, I have in some way made myself look incredibly stupid by wearing a daft costume. Halloween saw me don my ghost outfit. Christmas saw Mr. Mike Claus distribute presents. What possible clothing atrocity could I have donned this time?

Moving swiftly on, then. After the egg painting challenge had drawn to a close, it was time for us to tell the kids what Easter was actually about. Well, that was the plan. Fortunately, we had an exchange student from Australia, and two returnee students from America and England to do all our work for us, while we I ate all the jelly beans.

To stop the kids getting sort of bored, we then played two very short games. The first one was a race – each contestant had to push their egg, using only their nose, a short distance. I am sad to say I only managed a 3rd place. More unfortunate was the fact that none of the girls would play the game, because they were wearing skirts. I’ll say no more. The chicken race game was more of a hit – run along a winding course with your hands holding your ankles. This time the girls could play, and it led us nicely into the final game of the day – the Easter egg hunt.

Because we had to very carefully ration our eggs, we decided to hide little fluffy balls all over the place. The kids had to first complete a crossword, then the hunt began. It tided us over nicely to 5.30, at which point the most fun game ever started – Operation Easter Cleanup.

The kids had a great time, and secretly so did I. As far as I know, this will be the last party we put on for the school, so it’s sad to say I won’t be wearing any more ridiculous costumes. Nevermind!

Yesterday I played soccer! A short update will appear magically in a little while!

I noticed I haven’t really been telling everyone what I’m going to be doing recently. So I thought I’d fill in everything I have planned so far for the next two months. Obviously this is bound to change as “Mike” and “everything went according to plan!” are rarely, if ever, found in the same sentance. Anyway…

Junten Easter Party
First there was the school festival, followed quickly by the Halloween Party, then the Christmas party. Now we’re teaching a whole new set of students, we’re going to ploy them into studying English at university with chocolate eggs and silly, silly games. I will be bringing my old camera to this event, as I don’t really want huge, high definition shots of students crawling around on the floor pushing eggs with their noses.

Soccer
As long as everything goes to plan, this Saturday I will be joining my friend Sven’s soccer club, and playing every Saturday from 6pm. I know I can play soccer in England and I should only try traditional Japanese sports like Shorinji or whatever, but the big difference here is that I am quite good at soccer because I have twice the range on my strike as most of the other players! Thank you gene pool!

Trip To Nagoya
My good friend Mari from the final Kyoto update lives in a town near Nagoya, and has invited me down there for a crazy weekend of sightseeing and perhaps also sitting on a train for a very long time. Ignoring people on a train is without a doubt one of my favourite hobbies so I am very excited about this one!

Thai Students / Disneyland!
I’ve never been to Disneyland. I don’t particularly like standing in a queue that weaves it’s way around various vomit landmines in order to be assaulted by a man in a Goofy costume, under the premise of “having fun”. But soon some students from Thailand will be visiting Japan, and it has fallen upon Matt and I to bear the load that is going to Disneyland for free and eating lots of candyfloss. (I added in the last stipulation myself – nobody can say I don’t pull my weight now!)

So I hope that will make up for the last week’s lack of updates and photography. People have asked what happened to the gallery – it’s still there but I really only want to give access to my family for now – I need to sort it out and I don’t have the time. Everyone else can check out my Flickr, which I will update after I head back to the park I passed on the walk the other day and take pretty pictures.

According to the Junten school schedule, I officially began work last Friday. In reality that means I spent every day of last week at work, doing various crazy and exciting things as planning sample lessons for new students, sitting in my office and something that I have called “Progressive Time Management”, which means sitting in my office staring at a clock.

One thing that was fun, however, was the walk on Saturday morning. It was planned to start at around 8.30am, but I was told to arrive at Junten a bit earlier than that to prepare the students for the day ahead. This means it was a very bad thing when I accidentally set my alarm clock to go off at 7pm, and had to run to school at 8.06. Once there I pretended I had planned to get in at 8.15 looking like I’d just been drinking and quickly hid amongst the teachers so as not to draw attention to myself. This would have worked had it not been for my height, blonde hair and English voice.

We were set to walk from Junten School to Tokyo University, via a few little parks and sites of interest on the way. Joining us would be all the first year junior students, brand new and scared and yet to be forever scarred by the Junten discipline council. They were very excited at the prospect of being in school but not being in uniform. I’d make some elitist comment about them being easily excited here but Wahoo! I’m in school in a shirt and jeans!

The weather couldn’t have been nicer, which was somewhat of a blessing as we’d had a freak rainstorm with snow just a few days before. Proudly we set off to the first destination on our journey – the nearby park where the cherry blossoms were still in bloom. I was quite upset by this because I had not brought my camera with me. Permission for anyone and everyone reading this to be very angry with me granted. The park itself is very small and kind of boring, and it doesn’t hold a candle to the other stuff we walked past, so I’ll stop writing about it. A lot more interesting was the next thing we arrived at. I was told it was a National Park, albeit the smallest National Park in the entire universe. It was still quite big, but I think you could have comfortably walked around the entire thing in an hour or two. The place itself was stunning, and I spent the whole time either kicking myself for leaving the camera at home, and being asked to swap business cards with the new students. All the students and teachers had been asked to make a few business cards, with their name, class and a message for the receiver. Everyone else got away with writing about six, but I was instructed to make forty. Originally I had complained because writing messages in Japanese takes a long time, but in the end it turned out that forty was not nearly enough. Quite a few heartbroken students were turned away cardless towards the end of the day. The early first year gets the worm, kids!

The kids spent the time in the park playing Nature Bingo. Quite a few of them asked me to help them find some random plant or flower or something, but I politely refused, insisting they had to complete the game by themselves. Actually, I just really wanted to play as well but nobody invited me, and there was no way I was helping another team to complete their task! I secretly managed to find all the different ferns, animals and trees without even using a sheet. That’ll show them. After everyone had finished, we made our way from the park towards the university, stopping on the way at some famous author’s house who’s name escapes me.

Finally, we arrived at Tokyo University. What can I say? I’ll have to head back there at some point and take some photos of this place. A huge Kyoto shrine would not really have looked out of place in this thing’s garden. A garden that is perfectly maintained and financed, for a load of drunken students to throw up on. I think. I almost felt like pulling out a few bottles of Vodka and getting into the spirit of things myself. Instead I decided it would be more diplomatic to follow the rest of the group downstairs, into the underground cafeteria.

That’s right. Underground Cafeteria. About the size of two football fields, the cafeteria is a huge circular room which can fit hundreds of people in at the same time. The food itself is great, although there are no windows and I couldn’t help but feel a little claustrophobic. The students enjoyed it too, and I had to fend off a few more with “I have no more cards” so I could actually eat my meal.

The walk itself was a great experience and I had a nice time, it was only 8km, so it wasn’t really that tiring at all. This term I will be an assistant homeroom (form teacher) for the first year juniors, which I am really looking forward to because they seem like a lively bunch. Feel free to point me to this article when I write a huge update complaining about them next month, though…

Every year in Japan somewhere in March or April, all the pretty cherry blossoms magically turn from boring blank trees into waterfalls of pink and white flowers. In most countries we’d say “Well, that’s pretty” then ignore it. But not Japan. Because the blossom are only around for about ten days, and the Japanese spend the other 355 days talking about them, everyone throws big parties to celebrate. Hurrah! Before I go any further, here is a picture of said Hanami, using my new photo layout. Basically, instead of posting sets of three tiny pictures, I will post one big one instead, big enough so you don’t need to click on it unless you really want to see a bigger version.

As you can see, they’re pretty beautiful things. We definitely don’t have any trees that look quite as stunning as these do when everything’s all in bloom, but at the same time, come on Japan, it’s only a tree.

Tree or not, my good friends Satoshi and Yuko (who I went snowboarding with in Niigata) invited me and about 80 other people sit on some plastic sheets over a hard ground, drink a lot of beer, eat a lot of food and talk it up under said trees.

Bearing in mind the following rule;

Japanese People + Alcohol = Pure Insanity

Pure insanity quickly took over the proceedings. It wasn’t long before quite a few people were red in the face and stumbling a little, and considering there was enough food to feed an army it was becoming apparent that we were going to run out soon. Before some more people turned up and brought another six tonnes of dried octopus and soba noodles.

I’m not sure where it came from, but at some point in the party Satoshi had managed to get hold of a megaphone, and was barking such important messages such as “Drink! Now drink more!” and “I’m pretty wonderful!” at a regular rate. Normally someone from a quiet corner would chuck a brick at him, but as I previously stated the Japanese people plus alcohol rule reigned supreme, and nobody thought this was odd at all.

As much as I’d like to be able to sit here now and write “Gosh, those other Japanese (and a few foreigners) really were barmy”, except that the friend I brought along was not exactly scoring any home runs for Team Sanity. Yumi, one of Matt’s evening class students that we are both good friends with, had joined me and, even though she’d drunk less alcohol than you could find in say a brick, she was still running around the park chasing the children. Oh Yumi.

She did have a few allies in chasing said children, but in the end they won and, dejected, she gave up, came back and started talking rubbish again. I got the chance to talk to the kids using my wacky Japanese, which they enjoyed tremendously, especially when I made grammar mistakes that they would correct without the slightest sugaring of the pill. Their parents looked on with shocked faces as I stumbled my way through an imperfect verb and they massacred me, conjugation-style.

Finally, everyone was taken to an Izakaya (like a Japanese pub), where no doubt they got more drunk and the megaphone was abused even more. However, I had bigger fish to fry (bigger fish being actually making it home) so I decided to call it a day and head home. I’ve got about another six million Hanami parties to come, so stay tuned for more pictures of Yumi embarrassing herself. Not like they’re hard to find.