The International Man

(Well, this actually happened some time ago, but I just recently got the pictures from it.)
Every year, the city of Kure puts on an International Festival to celebrate the various foreign cultures present in the city. Though Kure is small by Japanese standards, there are people from China, Korea, Brazil, the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, Mexico, Poland, Greece, Spain, and several others I can't think of right now. Anyway, this year, I was asked to host the festival with my Japanese teacher, Noriko Karasaki. I immediately agreed.
Noriko and I decided it would be funny if we switched roles and I was the Japanese MC and she was the English MC. For about a week, we wrote out pages of script for the event, with all the introductions and transitions and such. I got more and more nervous by the day. During formal occasions, Japanese people speak a special kind of super-formal Japanese that is quite different for the everyday Japanese that I marginally speak. As the script got longer and longer, more and more unrecognizable words kept popping up, and I got increasingly worried. Still, Noriko encouraged me.
We also decided that I would dress up in a very traditional male outfit called a haori hakama that actually belonged to Noriko's husband's grandfather. Obviously, it was a bit short, causing people to snicker at my bare calves.
Nervous as I was, the event went off mostly without a hitch and everyone had a good time. There were two parts, a Japanese Speech Exhibition and a World Performance Event. For the Speech Exhibition 8 foreign residents of Kure made speeches about themselves/their countries in Japanese. The World Perfomance Events were the most interesting, though. There was a bosa nova band, a Chinese martial arts demonstration, and medly by the Crazy Foreigners Club (クレージ外人協会) made up of Melody, Jason, Masato, and Julie, a teacher from England. Julie performed a very difficult violin piece, Masato did hip-hop dancing, and Mel and Jason performed several Maori songs and Jason did the hakka, a traditional Maori dance.
The show closed with a group of elderly Japanese ladies dancing the hula with their granddaugthers. It was really cute until someone pulled me on stage and made me dance with them. Of all the pictures they took that day, the one of me dancing the hula was the one that made it into the papers and into the hands of my students.