I have faced many challenges since coming to Japan,

• Food whose origin, consistency, ingredients let alone name I cannot imagine.
• Sports from sumo to skateboarding to judo.
• Studying, more avoiding, a language different from my own in grammar, written characters, pronunciation and seeming sense.

I’d be lying if I said I have overcome any of those challenges, but I have certainly made some progress on all of them, minus the skateboarding.

Nevertheless, all of the items listed above are like trying to ride a bike compared to my ultimate opponent,

Unicycles have become a regular element of my weekly i-ki-i-ki, いきいき, or after school play hour club.  It’s basically playground with a host of weapons from tennis rackets to soccer balls to origami and those one-wheeled-monsters.  Obviously the kids are all pro’s, but pour moi every time ends with a pain in my shin, children laughing and this emasculating humiliation ,

It doesn’t help that the other gaijin adult volunteer puts me to shame,

It was a relief tonight to go to judo practice, where despite being 23 years old and the worst one there, every movement does not end in complete failure.  The night was capped off particularly well, when I asked some girls who I taught for the first time today,

“How are you?”

They initially went to the standard child response of “How are you?” back, but caught themselves, which in and of itself was a success that they recognized their mistake.  Then, a tear nearly came to my eye when an older girl whose school I teach at weekly stepped in as teacher for me, and taught the struggling girls the correct response, “I am fine, thank you.  And you?”

Finally, lest any of you are worried I am getting homesick, I give you this irrefutable evidence that I am fine.

Écrit près Charles Jeffrey Danoff
danoff dot charles at gmail dot com
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