World Campus International Blog

Another awesome day in Toride and in World Campus – Japan.

This day we not only learned about Japanese kites and the history of kites in general, we also learned how to make them, color them, glue the pieces together and how to tie them together.

The LOC brought in a professional kite maker to teach us how to make a great kite

120 kites were made that morning, World Campus – Japan members, LOC Members (Local Organizing Committee) and host families were divided into three groups with a different theme each. Ocean Theme, Flags Theme and Kanji Theme (Japanese Writing).

The final result was awesome, we had a blast creating the 120 kites even though was so hard to organize them without ruining them but we made it through and went to the next part of the day. We never imagined how cool it was going to be.

We took off with three boxes full of kites tied together. Everyone walked to the park close by, with amazing view, super green grass and just the perfect wind for the kite flying.

We all made an effort and manage to make our kites fly up in the air, 40 of them, all tied together. It was just beautiful as you can see in the picture.

All the World Campus – Japan Participants, host families and LOC members were having a great time, enjoying the weather and looking at our kites fly together. We also played and took some really cool pictures.

For us, that afternoon was not just a moment to fly kites, it became the best team building afternoon we ever had in World Campus – Japan!

On the morning of this day we went to the Kubota Factory in the City of Tsukuba, very close to Toride. The Kubota Factory is a tractor and big machinery factory with a lot of technology in their facility. They even have little robots running around performing different tasks. It feels like at some point this robots will take over everyone’s job at the factory. Maybe they will in the future.

An interesting fact about this factory is that they have all the signs in both japanese and Portuguese because they have a very high Brazilian population among their employees.

Continuing with the day, we went back to our meeting place and there were community members waiting for us to teach us different Japanese “activities” like Karate, Koto (Japanese Traditional Harp), how to dress and be a Ninja and Yasukibushi (Japanese Dance or Eel Dance).

I have to say this last two were so funny! But we will talk about Yasukibushi only, since we already talked about Ninjas in one of our articles from Uda City.

Yasukibushi, a very funny japanese dance that explains the process of fishing for eel. The participants of World Campus – Japan had the chance to learn from a very good performer from the area. They were wearing the complete attire for the dance, including a big basket to put the eel in, afer catching it.

The picture doesn’t really show how funny it was, but if you have a chance, search for a video of this very traditional and entertaining dance.

Those who learned had a blast laughing and trying to do the movements the right way and those of us who were watching really had sore stomachs after the dance from laughing so much watching our friends do the dance.

Definitely a great day!