Acceptance

Today was another day with the Seattle-ites (I'd say Americans if America was a country, as it stands, it's two continents, they come from a collective of states within it with only a title, no real name, it's be like if I said I'm a male of the Card family). We visited a school for a few hours, saw how popular foreigners can be, especially if they can speak Japanese (id est me). We watched students play sports, talked to ALTs, their students and an ex-exchange student and had a brief meeting with the head of the school. While their host mothers are the chaperons, I seem to be their unofficial translator.

Then we headed to a craft shop where we glued glitter on to platters in a painting-like way. The local paper was there with a cameraman who told me to hold the paintbrush with my right hand, effectively stopping me from doing anything for about ten minutes while the pictures were taken. Then a fellow Westerner working with them asked us some questions, but mixed in some of his own and we had a good conversation about Japan. We shared many ideas and while he and I seem to have been here long enough to accept these as fact, the Seattle-ites are new to most of this. Instead of accepting things here and making them into conversation topics, they point them out and make fun of or complain about things (I'd also like to point out that we have plenty of positive thoughts about Japan as well). I also think that being foreign has a part in this as well, but I still hold Japan as the larger factor. Also, I think the reporter also found it interesting that the Seattle-ites had little interest in Japan before they came (they knew about it almost entirely through their Japanese language class back home).

We then checked out most of what we could of a museum before it closed. It had lots of stuff from the Meiji era including old maps the Seattle-ites kept making negative comments about. It seemed like they have never seen an old map before, actually I asked then if they ever saw them in history classes. They said they hadn't and that old maps are useless now that we have Google. Usually I'm all for progress and Google (and using Wikipedia instead of tedious research), but this just annoyed me. It was like going to an art museum and saying that artists should just get cameras. My opinion of residents of the-country-that-should-really-get-a-name has been raised a lot by people on exchange, especially Mike, Nick and TJ, I just hope these new buggers don't soil that image (I'm hoping it's just and age thing or something like that).