Kofu, the last safe haven: The recorder incident

On Wednesday (17th) I, and various other international students, were subjected to a 'welcome party', hosted by the Faculty of Education. Having gone to another department's party on Monday (15th) I thought I knew what I was in for, light conversation, mingling, meeting new people in a relaxed enviornment with food and drink. What I, and none of my fellow brethren, were prepared for was an oddly formal event lasting more than two hours in which we were obliged to partake in origami, caligraphy and trying on, and then removing yukata infront of everyone present (I was thankfully spared from this). Up until the half-way point in the gathering I was in a fairly good mood, not overly happy, as I couldn't eat any of the food available and was begining to feel the pangs of starvation within my gut, but overall I wasn't complaining, the caligraphy was pleasant enough, the origami was fun, seeing my fellow german and french colleagues embarrassing themselves was midly entertaining.

This was soon to change, however, as three women (two young university students and an older lady) walked to the front of the makeshift stage area with a recorder in each hand. I turned to my friend and saw the same panic I was feeling reflected in his eyes, we turned back as the trio began to play a classic Japanese children's song, beloved by all those gathered, which no doubt made the fact that both me and my friend, as well as several other international students couldn't stop laughing throughout the entire song, incredibly insulting. The song transitioned from just being played on the recorders to being sung by the trio as well which didn't help hilarity levels at all. After they had finished, we tried to make an escape but we had apparently misunderstood a social queue as everybody gathered into small circles to play a game, which left a frankly disturbing impression upon each of us, as each person made a loose fist with one hand and placed it in the centre of the circle while one person placed their finger into each persons 'finger hole' in time to the recorder music until the designated 'fingerer' landed on a final person (as dictated by the music). After asking what happened in the end I recieved clarification that the final person was "just the loser" and that "there's no deeper meaning" to the game. At this point me and my companion took our leave, red faced and shaking with laughter, we felt tremendously bad as, to the Japanese students and teachers present, we were probably terribly offensive to their nice childhood games and songs but years of being traumatised from childhood in the UK education system with recorder lessons was too deeply engrained for us to respectfully restrain ourselves and smile pleasantly.

Two victims of the forced yukata dressing.

Beautiful ladies!

At the weekend (20th&21st) I went down to Tokyo to see one of my favourite bands (神聖かまってちゃん) with my friend and it was fantastic! After the concert we stayed up until 3:30 doing karaoke which was splendid, as always. The next day, we met up with two more friends and had some delicious lunch in Tokyo station (they even had some gluten-free noodles for me!). After lunch, we did three hours of karaoke which was just as fun at the previous night's.