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March 1 -2
HAJET Winter Meeting, Furano

HAJET (Hokkaido Association of JET) holds several meetings each year in different parts of Hokkaido. The winter meeting this year was held in Furano, also known as the "bellybutton of Hokkaido" due to the fact that it is the geographic center of the island. I will be the Webmaster for this coming HAJET year, so I thought it would be a good idea to be at the meeting :) .
After the HAJET meetings, on Saturday afternoon most people went skiing or snowboarding in Furano. However, seeing how I don't have ski boots, etc. in my size and that I fractured my ankle a few short months before, I opted for the other opportunity, which was to have a Kendo class. Kendo is the Japanese art of beating the crap out of each other with long wooden sticks. Seriously though, it is comparable to fencing, except you use wooden swords that resemble Japanese katana. Also, you get to wear some cool looking body armor. It was pretty difficult for me. There was a lot of timing with your feet and such that threw me off. Needless to say, the 5 year olds there could have kicked my butt. It was still fun, though.      (I need to thank Daniel Lee and Devon Wilson for the pictures. Also, I do not have the enlarged versions of some of these pictures, so if you click and nothing happens, just move on to the next picture :D )
Our teachers demonstrating with the real swords	Sitting like this hurts after a while
Learning how to hold the sword>	Kenny getting suited up
This is me, all suited up	AHHHHH!
I'm sure these kids got a kick out of practicing with us	The younger ones fighting
The older ones fighting	Attack!
Would you like a mint?
The next day we had a choice of several traditional Japanese arts: sadou (tea ceremony), koto playing, soba (buckwheat noodle) making, and shodou (Japanese calligraphy). I opted to go to the shodou workshop. It was a lot of fun. I'd been dying to try shodou since I got to Japan, so this was my chance. The instruction was all in Japanese, but it was pretty straightforward, so we didn't have much trouble understanding it.
One of the keys to doing shodou well is the hand posture. You are supposed to hold the brush by the top tip, leaving a lot of space between your hand and the paper you are writing on. We did three different words. The first was the Chinese character for "one," then "sakura," which means cherry blossom, and finally a word of our choosing. I was going to write "Asahikawa" in Kanji, but I instead decided to write "umi," which is the sea or ocean.
Rachel and Monica	The brush and the ink holder
Hard work...	The teacher about to do one with a huge brush
Kenny's finished product...	..and the mess he made doing it.
Nextdoor they were making soba, or Japanese buckwheat noodles. Soba is super popular here, but it looks like it is difficult to make from scratch.
Cutting into noodle form	Tools of the trade

March 7

A Japanese friend of mine, Koyama-san, took me and my friend John out for the evening. We went to an izakaya in downtown Asahikawa. I had no idea what we were eating, but he would not let us pay. Well, it's a good thing we didn't pay, because it turns out that we were having fugu! Fugu is the Japanese word for blowfish, which you may remember from a Simpsons episode a few years ago where Homer ate the fugu and then ended up thinking he was going to die. Fugu is a posionous fish, but only certain parts. The chef assured us that the poisonous parts of the fish were some of the organs, and that we weren't eating any of the organs. We had fugu sashimi (thinly sliced raw fugu) and fugu shabu-shabu (fugu cooked quickly in boiling water). It was actually pretty good.

The strange thing about the evening was the company that we had at the izakaya. Apparantly, Koyama-san is part of a social group of people that meet every so often for dinner. However, this group was made up of some of Asahikawa's elite. Included in the group that evening were: the Owner of the New Hokkai Hotel, the General Manager of the New Hokkai Hotel, Asahikawa's number one ikebana (flower arrangement) expert, a radio personality (I think they called her the "Frog Lady"), and the Owner of most of the McDonald's in the Asahikawa area. Needless to say, I felt a little out of place. However, they couldn't have been more gracious, so I soon felt at ease with them.

Oh, and in case you wanted to know, I didn't die from the fugu.

March 18

Today was my last day at Shibetsu Shogyo (Commerical) High School for this school year. The Japanese school year ends in March and then begins again in mid April. In my office, the ALTs usually visit different schools every year. However, we were told that if there were one or two schools that we would like to keep in the next school year, then we could request them and it is a possibility that we could go to those schools again. So, hopefully I will be able to visit Shibetsu Shogyo and Asahikawa Shogyo again next year.
Suzuki-sensei at this school is trying to start a pen pal program with a school in Australia. She had all of her first year students write a letter to the Australian school. In addition, they all learned to sing "Imagine" by John Lennon. They were videotaped singing that song and a Japanese song and that videotape will be going to Australia with the letters. There are two first year classes (1A and 1B), but they both sang different Japanese songs, which required me to learn two new Japanese songs. It went well though, and at least I have a few more Japanese songs for karaoke.
I'm on the right, Suzuki-sensei is on the left, and some of the 2nd year business communication students are in the middle	I said no pictures!
Getting ready to sing	Peace!
The future of Japan (worried?)
Here's some purikura of me and Julianna that night: