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So like I was blabbing about last last week, last week I had to get my butt to neighbouring Hyogo prefecture’s Mt Rokko’s YMCA (In before lame jokes about the YMCA… Ooops) to hopefully educated some 14-year old boys about the Truly Fail Asian country that I come from.

A taste of natto what you’ll be getting in this post - ugly censors, Tondemo Nothing! style. May the Library Task Force shoot me. (Don’t ask me if it’s even necessary to keep this much sense of so-called ‘confidentiality’ in this post. I’d like to avoid being sued as much as possible thank you very much)

(That’s about 4 persons’ portions of natto btw… whomever - myself included - who didn’t want theirs just passed it to this kid XD)

So basically, me myself, 4 other foreign students (each of us from a different country) and 50 odd of them students from a local private boys’ middle school and their teachers spent the 3 days (really 2 since the first and last days were half and half) at this ‘camp’ (no tents involved though, and the rooms we got were much better than I expected). I was slightly unprepared since the number of students turned out to be about twice what the teachers previously told us to expect, but I was expecting to be a fail ‘ambassador’ anyways so it didn’t matter how many of them watched me do it really it didn’t become much of an issue in the end. I might;ve gotten to know them a bit better if there were less of them, but the more the merrier they say…

The boys were split into 5 groups of 10/11, each under the ‘charge’ of one of us foreign students. The actual responsibility of taking charge of them is still the teachers’, we just had to spend time with them, asking them questions in English to get them to respond in English. The whole purpose of the camp, besides exposing the kids to some foreign cultures, was to give them some English exposure as well (had to keep in mind that despite them being 14, this was only they’re 2nd year learning English in the Japanese education system)

At the start, we had to play a few ‘orientation’ games with the group of students we were with organized by the YMCA folk. Something to get things going and the students to open up (though I daresay I needed that more >.<). It involved some run-of-the-mill(?) teamwork encouraging activities like “figure out how to get the entire group over one side of a rope to the other - while holding hands the entire time” or “squeeze everyone through a hula hoop - while holding hands the entire time”… Okay I dunno how exactly ‘run-of-the-mill’ those were but they involved a lot of hand holding which got things rather tangly… The ones that didn’t involve hand holding, like the one above turned out to be confusing as well - this one was everyone standing on individual bricks, and we had to switch positions without stepping on the ground… I was too busy laughing at how much bodily contact it still involved.

“Jalur Gemilang, blahblahblahblahblah…” (My mind is curiously unable to remember lyrics in Malay)

After that we (foreign students, or in this case ‘teachers’) got our individual ‘classrooms’ where we were to receive each of the 5 groups in turn over the course of the first 2 days and ‘educate’ them for about an hour per group (each group would eventually have ‘visited’ and spent an hour at all 5 ‘countries’). Thanks to my senpais without which I’d have nothing to show the boys, btw. In the end, what I brought was rather shoddy, but I was glad to be able to at least show the flag and some postcards (thanks to Visit Malaysia Year 2007) to reflect the nicer looking parts of my country XD

Well, as expected, I practically bored the kids to death talking about Malaysia and the postcards. There were a few bases we were asked to cover like capital city, currency, most popular food/sport etc. and “How do you say Hello/Goodbye/Thank you/etc. in your country”. Mostly, I tried to use as much English as I could despite the often blank stares I got, which had me breaking into gaijin Japanese to rectify, but that had its limits. Like how do you describe Nasi Lemak in another language?? (Why the hell did I choose that out of the gazillion options of ‘most popular food’ when I could have just said ‘satay - it’s like yakitori.’ *smacks head against wall*)?

As for the half hour ‘activity’ I chose to share with them, due to the lack of any actual spherical object of plant-form origin needed for sepak takraw (it just wouldn’t be sepak takraw if I used a rubber ball, would it?), I decided to use my last resort after all, yes that’s right I taught them chor dai di Pepsi-Cola of all things.

For those who don’t know: show

As a ‘bonus’, I had them “Lat Tali Lat” instead of the usual Rock Paper Scissors to decide on who’ll be it  - that at least I know to be Malaysian - though they never did get the chant right and started devising ones of their own XD

Yea, I purposely went with the shots where I didn’t have to shoddily censor anyone =P

But the main point is, the boys actually had fun (or so they said. I trust they still have that painful honesty about them at their age) running and jumping around the room. It ended up being rather different from what I remember the game to be like back home. Somehow I recall Pepsi-Cola involving a lot of instances where someone would be crouching near the ground like an animal ready to strike before suddenly sweeping a leg out in an arc hoping to catch the target’s foot unawares… Well none of that happened with these boys, they were more for the “strike as fast as possible” tactic (as expected from a school that’s apparently famed for the students’ athletic capabilities). Maybe I’m just old slow, but I’d never had thought a game of Pepsi-Cola with 11 players could only last 5 minutes sometimes (and I made sure they adhered to the “move only when ‘it’ moves” rule as much as I could…), but that just meant they could play the game over and over again which they were incredibly glad to (guess that speaks much about how boring the ‘lecture’ preceding it was -_-”)

“I’m calling the star rise…”

After finally going through the same routine 5 times with the 5 groups, it became their turn to teach us about their country Japan - in English of course. And I had to say I enjoyed this segment the most, where each group gave a small presentation+game bit to us foreign students. This one in the picture talked about Japanese swords and kendo and we got to participate in a mock fight. We were also taught how to play marbles, spin tops (thank god I didn’t choose to teach them about gasing) and this game where you had to smack cardboard cards on the floor (name eludes me) which the boys let me win in the msot embarassingly obvious ways possible -_-” The one group that told us the story of Momotaro using hand-coloured pictures was rather adorable too (I guess it was due to the rather literal tEnglish they had to use: “The dog said ‘Momotaro, please give me kibi dango!” XD)

At the end of it all, there was this ‘quiz show’ segment where the boys in their respective groups were asked questions pertaining to what they (should’ve) learnt about each of the 5 countries. For each question they got right, they earned fake ‘money’ which would later be used in a junk food/candy auction at the end of the quiz. I wasn’t putting too much hope on my group since during the half hour before we were given to ‘revise’, all they wanted to do was play more Pepsi-Cola XD Well they did decently enough I suppose considering it was probably difficult for them to remember exactly stuff like “Terima Kasih” (’Thank you’ in Malay) which came out as “Ta-rima Kasih”… >.< The funny part was the auction - there was one boy in my group who kept on screaming “TEN THOUSAND YEN!!!!” for just about every item even when we didn’t actually want it, jsut to raise the eventual price I suppose =P

(One of the questions in the quiz was “How do you spell ‘Sri Lanka’?”, which I’m pretty sure the boy asked could’ve answered easily, bu they still made it multiple choice, one of the options being: S-I-R  R-A-N-K-A)

Random: During one of the meals, the boys I was sitting with started talking about them noisy cicadas outisde… which suddenly led to the comment (along the lines of) “Higurashi no Naku Koro ni… nanka, shoujo manga-poi?” (”Higurashi… isn’t it rather shoujo manga-ish?”) Thankfully, someone responded at once that it was certainly not the case, which the kid who said so in the first place seemed to already know (he was jsut stating what he firt thought of the franchise… wtf), so that saved me the trouble of rectifying that severe error…

And… that’s about it. The last day was mostly packing up, saying thank you and goodbyes, taking pictures which I won’t post since they’d be a whole block of shoddy censors anyways and… I had to say I had more fun then I initially expected, and though the boys probably know zilch about Malaysia at least they enjoyed being taught to jump around and stamping on each others’ feet =P

I suppose I could’ve taken more time to get to know the boys for the short amount of time we were given especially during meal times which we had together… But I blame myself for being a horrible person at socializing with kids (plus I’m a dreadfully boring person in RL and perhaps online as well) and I mostly used the time to ask things like “So how do you say “hello” in Vietnam/Taiwan? “, “Did you enjoy playing cricket? (’In Sri Lanka’) etc.

One thing to note was that the camp structure and set up was typically un-Japanese in terms of summer camps, due msotly to the influence of one of the English teachers who’s from New Zealand who insists that the Japanese school system is intent with being rather rigid and err… anti-fun? Hence the quiz show and the snacks and the games etc.

The boys themselves were well-behaved enough… well as well behaved as cheeky 14-year old monkeys kids can be expected to be :P I was glad to see that there was a general sense ‘healthy youthful enthusiasm’ and not so much of what I hear the stereotypically negative image of Japanese schoolboy around this age would be like i.e. “I am a potentially gloomy child who never gets to see his father who’s away at work all the time, am constantly lectured by my teachers for the most minor misdemeanors, am tied to a rigid SRS BSNS co-curicular activity regime, have to serve bullying senpais etc.” (Not sure how much of that is generally true or false)

As for why it’s taken me a long week to post this one, well… that’ll be another post (hopefully within these few days this time -_-”)