Yokkaichi International Association
My city has an "International Association" for foreigners like me. And foreigners not like me.
At the Yokkaichi International Association (YIA), I have a private Japanese lesson every Thursday with a volunteer teacher. It's very kind of him to use his time to teach me Japanese every week without pay. He's an interesting retired man who has always traveled a lot and is still an avid outdoorsman (mountain-climbing, canoeing, hiking).
Another function of the YIA is to ask me to correct the English in their publications. Usually, I stick around the office after my Japanese lesson and talk to the two office ladies: Tamami and Yuri. That's when I am asked to correct various announcements and fliers. I enjoy it. Also, each month they have a different foreigner give a presentation about his home country, and they have asked me to give the December or January presentation. I've never attended one of these functions because they are usually on Sunday mornings. But for mine, we'll do it on Saturday afternoon.
SO...If you have any ideas for what kinds of things I should say about America, please leave me a quick comment here. With your ideas, you can vicariously contribute to the Japanese conception of America.
3 Comments:
Your home country is TExas, Steve. Talk about TExas.
You can say things like:
(queue brash and arrogant hard rock background music)
no Americans but Texans are proud of their home state.
Texas is bigger than Japan...almost twice as big.
Texas is the only state in the union with the right to secede (is this true?)
Texas is the the economic powerhouse of mid-America...
In Texas we have texas-shaped noodles, cookies, vitamins, clocks, flower beds, bricks, and ice cubes.
(background music fizzles down like an old broken record player)
Laura S. said:
I'm thinking Texas-shaped vitamins would be quite painful on the way down with all those pointy parts...
America: Individualism (blame it on Whitman and Emerson), materialism (for some), many freedoms (for good or ill), diverse climates and geography, "melting pot" composition of people that is very much a part of our historical development. ;-)
As a fellow dweller in Asia, I'll let you know some of the differences I've observed. Americans have a very different idea of 'personal space' for everything-living space, how wide the roads are, how close we're willing to sit to a stranger. Americans are much more individualistic and less concerned about the common good. We're a little more anal-retentive about rules and such (at least when compared to Thailand; I'm not sure about Japan).
You should tell them funny stories about college in America. You could tell them about our CS progressive dinner that ended in caroling at Doc's place-look how many American things that includes!
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