Speech Contest Victory!

I just got back from the annual junior high English speech contest (last year's here). All of my students put in quite a lot of effort. My student from 2nd year got first prize! Hurray. I am proud of them all. I put a lot of time into coaching the kids on their speeches, so its really nice to see one of them do so well.

Here we are with the bling. Her winning speech was actually about experiences with a home stay student from Springfield, which made it even better.

A new addition to the teachers' room this week was a large box of thin paperback books. I've seen several of them on the students' desks. On closer inspection I saw that they were Gideon Bibles. They were so small that they could only contain a few books of the New Testament. It seems those Gideons have finished filling every hotel with bibles and are now moving on to small town Japanese schools. Not the most logical progression, but whatever. I think the chances of these kids actually reading the bibles are seriously slim. Christianity isn't doing so hot around these parts. Japan's page in the CIA Factbook lays it down straight: observe both Shinto and Buddhist 84%, other 16% (including Christian 0.7%).

I don't usually do product endorsements, but here goes. I have been using a new brand of toilet paper recently, and its good times. I highly recommend for everyone to go out and buy strawberry scented Hello Kitty brand paper. I'm a man that works hard, and when I come home I want my bathroom to smell like delicious fruits.

I can't afford to eat strawberries in this country, but this is a close second.

Tung was nice enough to put up some of my lost sumo clips up on Youtube for me, so I added a couple in the previous article. Check it out.