Whoops, 2 weeks passed in the blink of an eye!

SO! I meant to post about the なぎなた競技場 - Naginata competition at National Sports Meet a week or so ago but my video wouldn’t upload so I’ll just give you a quick summary here. This year it was held in Yamaguchi at Shimonseki City University. If you want a better understanding of what a naginata is I’d look it up on wikipedia but it’s like a big wooden stick.

Apparently I read it’s traditionally practiced by women, which I can’t really explain or understand but basically it meant that I was watching the national women hitting each other with sticks competition. It was pretty fierce and probably would’ve been more interesting if I understood the rules.

Sorry about the quality of the picture but I was zooming over a long distance, so as you can see this is the end result. It was quite interesting but I don’t think I could’ve watched the 30+ hours of competition they had over 3 days, seeing as I didn’t understand the rules.

Anyway, onto the next random topic I just feel like talking about right now. I was entering a speech contest and it turns out that was today. Before I explain how it went I’ll show you what I got.

That’s my certificate and it says 国際交流会賞 which is kind of like International exchange friend’s prize. In other words second prize. First prize was 学長賞 (Chancellor’s prize). First prize went to another contestant who actually memorised their speech, is much better than me at Japanese and didn’t make gross generalisations about Japanese and Australian people as a whole. Still, I got a 5000 yen gift voucher so I’m happy.

The part with the simple characters that says ジャクソン殿  is my name. ジャクソン is Jackson. And the character that follows it 殿（どの）[DONO], is equivalent to Mr. However, a more concise interpretation I stole from a dictionary is “a form of address used for official letters and business letters, and in letters to inferiors; Mr”.

Yeah, so that’s probably the major events for me recently. Chicks hitting each other with sticks and me misinterpreting cultural differences to the point where it’s amusing enough for me to win 2nd place in a speech contest. Keeping in mind I wrote the speech the night before, didn’t practice it once and didn’t get anyone to check it. I feel bad for the people who made a real effort. Still, I’m stoked, I made a couple of people laugh and some crazy chick called Yoshie wanted to be friends with me because she likes making people laugh. To commemorate our new friendship we did the わかめ dance on stage. I didn’t know what it was but わかめ means seaweed and you kinda just wiggle your body like a lunatic, so that sums it up. On that note, it’s about time I stopped rambling.

Cheers :3

Wakame  (species of edible brown seaweed, Undaria pinnatifida)