I am lazing about in the lap of luxury today. I have the day off because I worked on Saturday. We had our school festival called Challenge Seibu. My pictures from it are all crap because the batteries were dying on my camera. I asked my JTE (Japanese teacher of English) if he would give me a copy of his pictures. He has a crazy gigantic digital camera so I bet his pictures will be really great. The festival was good in parts but boring for me a lot of the time because there were so many speeches in Japanese that I couldn't understand. I think they were about the environment. When I get the pictures from him I will do a blog just about school festival. This photo is from Tokyo. It is huge and I thought it is appropriate because my post today is on the subject of love in Japan.
After the school festival we had an Enkai which is a kind of drinking party for the staff with a big dinner. I had a great time. It is a little strange to be drunk at 6:30 in the evening but it happens. They don't wait for your drink to be empty before refilling it. Basically they refill it after each sip. It is impossible to gage how much you have had to drink. And that was just the beer course. Then they brought out trays of hot sake.
They did an interview of the teachers and asked them who had a partner who was not a teacher. Anyone who didn't have a teacher for a partner had to stand up and tell the story of how they met and fell in love. It was really heart warming to hear their stories (through a translator of course!). Some things are the same all over the world and love is one of them. They struggled with waiting to talk to their sweeties and the suffering of being young and in love. It made me smile. Here are just two of their stories:
My principal (Kocho-sensei) fell in love with his karate sensei's daughter when he was in college. He started seeing her on the sly but his sensei found out eventually. During the next karate practice, he was selected to be the sensei's sparring partner. The guy immediately put him in a head lock and started choking him. He said that after he fainted, he got up and told him that he was in love with his daughter and they bowed to each other. Then he was allowed to date her and they married shortly after. They have been together for about 40 years now.
My vice principal (Kyoto-sensei) met his wife in his first year of teaching. He had to get something done at the board office so he called and a woman answered the phone named Kanata-san. He talked to her for only a short time but he was really impressed with how she spoke and handled herself on the phone. He knew after that call that he had to talk to her again. So he made up excuses to call the board office everyday after that, hoping she would answer the phone. But he never got her again after that until one day, several weeks later she finally answered the phone. He asked her out right away. He then began learning jokes to impress her and make her laugh.
He didn't know what she looked like and when he went to the place where they were meant to meet, there were several people around and he didn't know which one was her. He saw a very beautiful girl in the crowd and he knew it must be her. He approached her and said that he hoped her name was Kanata-san because he thought she was very pretty. He said that she sounded beautiful on the phone so he knew it must be her and it was. They went on a few dates and it all went well. After a few more dates he asked her father if he could marry her and the rest is history.
It’s nice to know that love doesn’t change no matter where you go in this world. It presents itself in different packages but at its core, we are all sharing the same experience.