Feb. 21: Nagasaki with Kwassui Homestay Families and Return to Osaka

The morning and midday of February 21 we spent with our homestay families touring around Nagasaki.  Some of us visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, which described the horrible effects of the atomic bomb and pleaded for future generations to prevent this from ever occurring again.  Others spent time at the Nagasaki Heritage Museum, which featured buildings and actors in period dress, as well as an exhibit on Egypt.  Still others visited Glover Gardens, an estate from the 1800's built by a wealthy Englishman.  A few went shopping ... again!

We met back up again at the Nagasaki train station around 3:45, and said a tearful goodbye to our homestay families.  Although students had only spent two days with them, they were very grateful for their homestay families' kindness and already missed them.

Back on the train to Osaka, we wrote in our journals and hung out with our friends.  Then one of the students had an idea ... wouldn't it be fun to go to Mos Burger, the best teriyaki burgers in Japan, on our last night?  The only problem was that we got back to Osaka at 10:10 PM, and the youth hostel said our curfew was 11:00 PM, only 50 minutes later.  Hurley Sensei said that the walk to Mos Burger would be 20 minutes long, and 20 minutes back, leaving us with only 10 minutes to order our burgers!

Thus began one of the fastest walks of our lives.  We made it to Mos Burger in 10 minutes, unfortunately took a long time to order, rushed back to the youth hostel, and made it by 10:58 PM.  Yatta!

Feb. 20: Kwassui High School

After spending the night at the homestays, the Wilcox students made their way to Kwassui High School to experience a normal Japanese high school day.  Arriving at 8:00 AM, we took off our shoes and slipped on the plastic slippers that we encountered everywhere in Japan.  Then we headed towards chapel, the first event of the day.

Chapel was short -- three hymns and a prayer or two -- and halfway through the speaker introduced our group to the school.  As the chapel full of young Japanese high school girls giggled at us, we bowed, and then sat down and finished the service.  When the Kwassui students filed out of the chapel, we moved to the front, where Hirao Sensei had set up a large projector screen and projector.  We watched a cheerful video depicting the various components of a Kwassui High School education: English classes as well as the usual math, social studies, science, and literature; sports; dancing; camping; music; study abroad.  It was impressive.  Then we were off to classes.

The first class was English with Hirao Sensei, where we played some icebreaker games that had us laughing with his class in seconds.  In one game, we all sat together in a circle, with one person standing in the middle.  This person would say, "People who ..." and would add a qualifier, like "People who ate rice with breakfast" or "People who like chocolate."  Then everyone with that characteristic would have to switch seats, and because the circle was one seat too short, someone new would end up standing.



In another game, one student would read a sentence to the other students, who would look at the array of cards in the middle of the circle and try to find the card with the hiragana letter that starts the sentence.  Our Wilcox students and the Kwassui students were all diving across the circle in attempts to reach the right card.

Next was math class, where we followed a geometry lesson about the angles in triangles inscribed in circles.  Although the lesson was given in Japanese, one of our Wilcox students was able to solve one of the sample problems that the math teacher wrote on the board.

Then lunch, where we joined a huge crowd of Kwassui students eating curry with rice, udon, or hamburger meals.  Following lunch we were off to social studies class, a lecture on economics with a quick-talking teacher who managed to explain the demand-supply curves, the Meiji era, the effects of media, and the Wealth of Nations all in one lecture.  When he stopped once to ask students to solve a problem, three of our Wilcox students stood up to answer it -- two incorrectly before the third wrote the correct answer and bowed to the lecture hall with a flourish.

A third-year junior high school English class followed, with the youngest students we had met thus far.  We made origami again, this time with more complex patterns, and practiced speaking Japanese and English in conversation.

Finally our day was over.  You can read Kwassui High School's PDF report about our fantastic day here.  

We returned to Hirao Sensei's classroom to meet up with our homestay families, many of whom were in the same high school class that we had followed throughout the day.  Going home with our homestay families, we spent the afternoon with them, ate dinner together, and again spent the night at their houses.