Genki Taisou....GO!
The title more or less translates to happy/energetic exercise....GO!
Today was...interesting.
...guess I better back up a bit. The story starts in October during the Ibara Sports Festival. After parading around the track all the participants gathered in the center of the field and lined up to do a warm-up. What us unsuspecting ALTs didn't know was this wasn't the usual, every-morning-radio-taisou the salarymen do. It was a mix of some warm up karate punches, marching, line dancing and jazz hands (okay the jazz hands were our addition). Of course, we thought the weirdness was AMAZING so we kind of...well, we were *genki*. We started to aim the punches at each other, do jazz hands, make weird faces, etc. Then it was finished; we had a laugh and the sports festival continued. We really didn't think anyone paid attention to our shenanigans.
Man, were we wrong. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago where one of my supervisors comes to me and lets me know that the city saw us do the Genki Taisou so *well* that the local broadcast wants to record us and air it. 5 of 6 pretty much screamed at him to let us do it. And so today, we did just that.
I have to say there was just a teeny, tiny moment where I felt...irked over what the instructor said. While we were practicing and asking questions of 'where does our arm go, which direction,' etc. she tells us that mistakes are okay (funny coming from a Japanese person) and the main point is for people to laugh. At first I thought well, to laugh *at* us? Sure, let's look at the silly foreigners do a taisou, dance, monkey dance! Because there are quite a few moments, both inside and outside the classroom where I do feel like the 'monkey' and perform for the kids/community. And well, let's face it, most of the time, I have no idea what's going most of the time anyway so I just go with the flow and do it. Besides, dancing is fun.
Regardless, the irked feeling went away because well, it was our fault for acting silly at the sports festival in the first place and come ON! We're being taped doing a warm-up exercise that the whole town will see!! How awesome is that?! Of course we all requested copies when it's finished. We ended the day with dinner (and DRINKING) at Champloo aka Champs. Even our supervisors came by for a drink to pat us on the back.
The taisou will air in January for who knows how long. Once I get my copy I'm immediately sending it stateside because otherwise I might end up setting fire to it.
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