day 26 - addiction strikes once more

29/06/07 23:22
back from a pretty long day. today i went to the ymca in the kannai district of yokohoma. katou-san brought me there, but i spent most of the day with a woman from the ymca who is called itou-san. i was supposed to see a bit of what they are doing there. in the beginning there i was to watch a kindergarten group. that was really amazing. this group was englishspeaking! and they weren`t just kids of foreigners, they were genuine japanese kids. kids of 5 years, speaking better english than 90% of their country`s population, seriously. that one kid really cracked me up. he was making himself an armor suit out of cardboard, complete with scabbard, sword, belt and crown. when i asked him what kind of outfit that was supposed to be (oh, speaking english, the joy!), he answered "THIS - IS - SPARTA!". I kid you not! he knew all about 300 and king leonidas and he really liked the movie. you know, i`m not a big defender of youth protection and all that shit, but letting a 5 year old watch 300 is a bit too much, in my opinion. still, i couldn`t stop laughing.
then i had lunch with itou-san and met some foreign students, who take japanese language courses at the ymca. 5 days a week, 5 hours a day, that`s the way to learn a language... we joined them for a lesson in grammar (woo, learned something new) and after that we went downtown. i had requested to go shopping a bit, and we ended up at a tower records store. tower records is a name you`ll want to remember if you ever make it to japan, because their stores are so awesome. the bands are listedin romaji and are as easy to find as in any european store and the selection is huge and awesome. godspeed, silver mt. zion, king crimson, ... you name it, they have it. i left the shop with considerably less money than i entered it with and i`ll have to spend the rest of the holidays on a tight budget i suppose. in the evening we went to a restaurant, where to my surprise a board meeting of the y`smen east japan region took place. i was kinda underdressed with my tourist t-shirt. and then the most surreal event yet took place. it was almost at the end of the dinner, everyone had eaten a lot (and some also drunk a lot i guess) and this one woman announced, that she had studied a german song and would like to sing it. she stood up and sang the german national anthem. well, a nice gesture, but she sang the first verse. of course a japanese wouldn`t know, that the first two verses are more or less banished here, but still, picture the setting. me, almost hawaii-style among 30 old japanese guys and women dressed in suits, one woman in the middle, singing "deutschland deutschland ueber alles!". i almost expected the others to stand up and do the hitlergruss. strange. didn`t tell anyone about it though, hehe. 23671.