An Olympic Event

A new term began at the community center for Japanese Language classes. We now have 2 new Chinese women, one buxom female from New Zealand or Australia, I can never remember, one Filipino hostess, and myself. At the beginning of class we took an exam to assess our proficiency in Japanese to determine which class we would be assigned to. I scored a 66. I thought I failed but the woman who was grading it said it was a very good score so I believed her.

After we filled out 3 identical forms that asked for identical pieces of personal information, we took a class photo. One of the teachers, an old man named Omura, was in charge of setting up the camera and there was much confusion. At first he said it looked too bare so we added some chairs and asked the spouses of the Chinese women to enter the photo, as well as other teachers standing nearby. After more people entered he said not everyone was in the frame so he asked people to get back out of the picture. Then someone told him just to move the camera back a few steps so he did. Success. When he pressed the trigger the timer gave him 10 seconds to run a few meters and enter the picture without looking like the guy who has to run to get into the picture. He ran using short, truncated steps, almost mouse-like, and giggled like a schoolgirl for those few meters. When the shutter released there was no flash so seeing him run back to take the picture again made me laugh inside.

After the photo we played some ice-breaking games, one of which involved using chopsticks to try and pick up various objects. The small red beans were worth 2 points, the larger, easier to grip black beans and ginnan were worth 1 point, ping pong balls were also worth 1 point, and finally, the marbles were worth 3points because of the obvious difficulty of trying to pick up a shiny, relatively heavy round object with a pair of sticks made from wood. We were granted one minute to pick up as many objects as we could.


Immediately after seeing the competitive look appear on the two Chinese women's faces it occurred to me that they had accumulated a century’s worth of combined experience in this particular event. If this were an Olympic event it mirrored a very likely result similar to the Team Finals in the Olympics for gymnastics:

Scoring Table
China 75
China 56
U.S.A. 40
Australia/New Zealand 25
Philippines 9