Day 181 in Japan - Hyakunin isshu (百人一首)

At Akashi kita today we spent the afternoon playing a traditional Japanese card came – “Hyaku nin isshu” (百人一首 - literally "100 person poem"). There is a famous old poem that was composed by 100 different people, which is read one line at a time. A group of people crowd around a table covered in 100 cards, each containing the second half of one line of the poem. The first person to recognize the card grabs it, and at the end, the person with the most cards wins.

I was asked to read out some of the cards (5 to be exact), which I thought would be a total blast, and happily agreed to. It was all fun and games until I heard the other teachers practicing their cards this morning. The cards were written in old Japanese – kanji and hiragana, but I didn’t think that would be too much of a problem, because I got my cards on Wednesday, and wrote out how to say them all in romaji. But apparently you don’t just read the words out – you half sing them in a lovely rhythm. Uh oh. There was no way that I was going to be able to master that in the next 15 minutes. Instead, I learned the Japanese word for “nervous” (おろおろ) instead, and apologized about my bad Japanese IN bad Japanese, then read my cards in my bad Japanese. The students were very nice about it, and I got a few congratulations, but I think that I made it harder for them to understand. My difficulties aside, it was a brilliant afternoon! The kids had a really good time, I saw a different side of a bunch of my teachers who read the cards in a lovely traditional Japanese lilt, and I got to do a whole lot of talking to the students and taking photographs. My science class won (GO 1-9!!!), and one of the students got 50 cards! That means that she took half of the cards, even though she was in a group of about 8-10 people.

After school, Sam and I had a quiet Friday night in. I was keen to go to karaoke, but it was too cold and we were too lazy, so instead we just played “Guess the Song” from my iTunes library, and sang along while he played Civ 4 and I read Harry Potter.

Food Highlight of the Day: Mini Wagon wheels! I don’t know what the are called in Japanese, but they were definitely mini wagon wheels.