Kon'nichiwa watashi no kazoku ta tomotachitashi! (Good day my family and friends,)
Wow, what a week it has been! So much happens in the space of a week that it's slightly hard to know where to begin.
First off- thank you so much for the package, Dad! Thanks for the m&m bars and the thermal gear; I know they will both come in really handy! I've been hearing a lot about how cold it gets in Japan lately, so it was just great to get some warm gear things (even in the middle of July.)
So this week, T. Sensei took a family vacation. Considering that he is also one of our investigators, that made for an interesting turn of events. Every day, our class had different investigators that we had never taught before. S. Shimai and I ate some pretty sour humble pie yesterday. We did a mogi (Japanese word for role-play) with a Sensei who was one step shy of legitimately Japanese. His parents were both Japanese even though he was raised in Utah- so we were slightly intimidated.
We knocked on his door, introduced ourselves, and apparently surprised him by asking very bluntly if we could come into his home... Yep, lesson in Japanese culture right there haha. We sat down, ready to find everything out about our investigator:
"Have you heard about Jesus Christ before?"
"Um... Not really, I know that Christmas is about him and some of my classmates celebrate it."
"Do you believe in God?"
"No?"
"Are you religiously affilated?"
"No, I never have been."
Oh boy! Well that was somewhat surprising, but we got to know him better as a person for a bit and then testified to him that God wants to help him with all of his personal struggles. He was only slightly weirded out by how forward we were! So it was an interesting (success?) but wow I never realized how fast people can actually speak Japanese. Hopefully you will all be able to hear me talking like a crazy fast native! It sounded so amazingly awesome!
And lastly, I want to recount a short story from A. Sensei (my second teacher.) He has the most hilariously awesome and strange stories about Japan. If I could give this one a title, it would be something like, "The way Japanese people Fight."
So, one day A. Sensei and his companion were waiting for the train to come by in the morning so they could go to the next town over. As they sat on a bench, they noticed a rather interesting circumstance. An angry and impatient man was having a rather crazy road rage moment on the side of the road. He was fit in too snuggly behind a car to be able to pull out, so he started honking like crazy at the man in the car in front of him. In the words of A. Sensei, "In all honesty, he was kind of being a jerk..."
Well, fed up of the impatient driver behind him, the man in the front car stepped out and started to stomp towards the angry driver. The angry driver was so surprised by this, that he frantically started cranking his window closed in fright. However, the front driver was still perturbed by how annoying and impatient the other driver was. So he started pounding on the window and yelling, "Hey, what's wrong with you?"
The angry driver's patience wore thin rather quickly, and he started to get out of the car. Well, the driver who had been in front of him was so surprised by this that he ran back to his car in fright, hardly believing that the angry driver was going to confront him!! But, the front driver seemed to realize what a chicken he was being as he was cowering back to his car. So he went back to confront the angry driver. They exchanged some rather heated and loud words, the angry driver got too close to him, and so the front driver put his hands up in front of him and nudged the face of the other man away from himself, accidentally knocking his glasses off.
The originally angry man flung himself on the ground after his glasses like the other man had punched him in the face!! Anyway, the rather anti-climatic ending of this story was that some police showed up, the angry driver whimpered and pointed and the man who had, "hit me!" and so the police turned to A. Sensei to question him. But the train had just arrived, so he jumped on with his companion to avoid any troubles or missing his train. It was such a funny story, I wish I could tell it like A. Sensei did, but yeah! Japanese people are generally so respectful of each other! They don't even know how to confront each other- I can't wait to have such funny stories of my own!!
I love you all friends and family and I hope that you have a great week!
Kokoro kara (from the heart,)
~Watkins Shimai
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