Here is a picture of the weekly Sunday bball game in Hachioji. Most of the pictures I took didn’t turn out that well because of the light and speed of the people.

Here is also a short video… Download… (400KB)

In Japan, you can never really tell what a person is like by the way they dress. A lot of time it is just a costume for the rest of the world to see. I had a unique student today when I was giving lessons in Nakano. A tall Japanese male in his 20s strolled into the class late dressed rather strangely compared to most students I have had. He had long bleached hair, pierceings, and wore this black raggedy shirt with of patches of bands on it. He wore old jeans with long chain attached to his wallet… he had that typical ‘I am a punk’ look. He later told me that he was a guitar player and vocalist in a punk band in Japan. If I were to look upon him in Los Angeles I would be afraid to go near him, yet in Japan appearances are often deceiving. The first thing he did when he met me was to sincerely apologize for being late. We then sat down and conversed in English with me helping him with any mistakes or problems. He decided to take some notes.. so this person, with an almost scary exterior, went into his bag and pulled out a “Doraemon” pencil case. For those who do not know, Doraemon is a very popular kids cartoon in Japan. We had a very interesting lesson, and he was very friendly and very nice to talk to. At the end of the lesson he bowed his head and gave me a sincere ‘thank you’.

On the train on way back home two guys dressed very similarly to the guy I had a lesson with got onto the train and stood next to me. These two people, all dressed up, started having a conversation on the train. I was expecting a conversation about heavy metal or punk music and not knowing much Japanese I didn’t think I would be able to understand the conversation anyway. Yet, I was extremely surprised when I was actually able to somewhat follow the conversation especially when they were using words like “HTML”, “Tables”, “Style Sheets”, “Programming”, “Animation”, and “Flash”. They even started to laugh when one of them made a joke about having a ‘0px table’. They were completely computer nerds! My stop came and I left the train.

Japanese people constantly amaze me.