A Must-Blog Day
I have to write about today. I HAVE TO. Because it was the weirdest-slash-coolest day I've had in awhile.
I worked the Japan booth at the Bowling Green International Festival almost all day. It was sponsored by the Japanese Culture Club, and I was sort of in charge of making sure everything was in place and we had volunteers. I wanted to stay as long as possible, too. After all, I brought my own stuff. I didn't want people messing with it, and I felt uneasy when I did take breaks. Call it the control freak in me. Anyway, we set up about 8:30 AM, and it was pretty slow for awhile. We had a steady trickle of mostly little kids who were thrilled to get Japan stickers for their little passport books and 1 yen pieces that the Taste of Japan food wagon had given us since we were situated right in front of them. I did katakana nametags, too (and was complimented twice by Japanese people for my writing).
One thing that happened during the morning was that a Japanese couple and their baby son came around. The husband spoke English, and the wife spoke a bit. I could pretty much understand what she was saying, though. They picked up my "An Introduction to Modern Japanese" textbook that I used for my first Japanese classes and were, well, laughing at everything. I wasn't offended, but I felt a bit embarrassed. The book was actually published in 1975, and it's a very basic Japanese book. Sure, it may have been simple to them, but I like that book.
I thought I had a desk shift from 11:00am to 12:00pm, but it turned out I was wrong, so I came back to school for nothing. So I went back to the festival and took over for the volunteers for that shift had left. We had good turnout for the next couple of hours. I went and got curry rice from Taste of Japan (they had just run out of yakisoba), and worked/ate. I had brought the four idol mags that I bought at Kinokuniya in SF and had put them out there. Boy, am I glad I did. They attracted attention. I found SO MANY international JE fans. You wouldn't even believe it. I had an awesome conversation with some girls from Vietnam about Kanjani8 and Toma. Let me tell you, THEY LOVED TOMA. My heart was bursting with happiness. I also had a conversation with a random mother who actually watches subbed dramas and TV shows on ViiKii and Dramacrazy. I did try to tell her about hardsubs, though, and their more awesome quality. She's watching Natsuniji right now, but she doesn't know about MatsuJun. HOW CAN SHE NOT KNOW ABOUT MATSUJUN? She said Yamapi sounded familiar. OH. EM. GEE.
So the idol mags were cool. I got comments on my CDs, too. I basically brought all six of my Japanese CDs *ahem* and people were fascinated/weirded out by some of them. Rachel and Scott stopped by and Rachel, as she always does, burst into laughter at seeing Japanese idols. She says it's the hair/clothing. I guess I am immune to it by now, but COME ON, THEY'RE IDOLS. Possibly the funniest thing all day concerning that happened later, which I'll tell about later.
The only thing that bothered me was that people kept coming up and going, "You guys aren't Japanese" like we're helping out at the Japan booth, so we HAVE to be Japanese. I'm thinking it doesn't matter as we long as we answer your questions, and trust me, I answered every question that came my way. Several people asked about Japanese lessons, and I answered that. They asked about the stuff, and I answered those questions. They asked us about ourselves, and I answered those that came to me. Anyway, how could they have known we weren't Japanese? Sure, one of the volunteers was blonde, and that was a tipoff, but one of the Japanese faculty sponsors' kid was there, and she didn't look Japanese at all.
At 2:30, Dr. Ishii, Mrs. Barnaby (the Japanese faculty member), and Kana, who is my first real Japanese friend EVER came to take over. I was fine sitting at the booth (again, here is the issue of me not wanting to be too far away from my stuff, I mean, a couple of girls tried to BUY my idol mags), but Dr. Ishii insisted I go and walk around. So me and another girl from the club walked around and looked at everything and lamented our lack of money. At 4:00, we watched the Bon Odori where the workers from all of the Japanese companies came together and danced. I took video of both dances and it will promptly be posted on Facebook when I don't feel like passing out.
It was after the Bon Odori that all of the Japanese people truly started stopping by. Before it, a couple of guys stopped by, and one asked, "daigakusei desu ka" and I just automatically replied "Hai" even though I'm not anymore. After the dance, however, we had pretty much every Japanese person come by the booth. The awesomely weird part came when Dr. Ishii saw my flumpool CD's and said she loves flumpool. HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS? Also, one of the Japanese women saw my Johnny's CDs and went "NEWSU...TOKIO...ara? Arashi inai no" and we all started laughing. I thought it was hilarious, because, no, I don't have any "official" Arashi CDs. But it was a "Seriously? Arashi is taking over the world" kind of moment.
Overall, it was a fun day. Good or bad thing: none of the older Japanese people talked to us. Kana and another Japanese student whose name I heard but couldn't really hear because of the noise were the two exceptions. I was really hoping some of them would try to talk to us, but it didn't quite work out that way. I hope they had a good impression of us, though. We were friendly and helpful to everyone, even though I felt a bit left out during my off time. I guess that's the control freak part of me.
Also, with so many people handling my CD's and mags, I am going to have to disinfect everything. My "What's flumpool?!" album has so many fingerprints on it now.
Ja ne!