Shaking the basket

yashukibushi

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!

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Tradition


WCJ Helping Toride

Sake Factory

The town we spend this week at is called Toride, a City located right outside of Tokyo, about an hour train ride to it. Toride has the beauty of a small town, lots of nature around, super green but with all the benefits of being very close to the big city…Tokyo.

Our first day in Toride was a very busy and interesting one because we had a very special task to complete on a very short amount of time.

The idea was to make promotion material for four different stores in the area that have been around for more than 100 years and because of the developing of the City, they have been losing clients and the town’s citizens have lost interest even though they are one of a kind store in their own business.

A Sake Factory, a Japanese Season’s Dolls Store, a Pickle factory and a Shovel factory.

After having a tour an explanation of the business from the owners we went off to create the promotion material.

World Campus – Japan participants enjoyed the visit, learned about their business and the products they make and tried to make the best promo material possible to improve their sales. We hope our work meets their expectations because we enjoyed it 100%.

Spring & Summer '09 Slide Shows published

The Spring & Summer Slide Shows of most of our partner cities are now available on the “Konichiwa from Japan”-section of our Website. Please take a look!!!

Our World Campus - Japan Summer 2009 version of Love Me Tender

Video: Love Me Tender

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If you have been following our program or our blog, you have no doubt heard about our “Arigato Event.” Performed near the end of each of our stays, the event is a way for us to say Thank You to the communities and host families who have worked so hard to bring us into their world. These communities do most of the work needed to make World Campus International a success. In each of our events, there is a section that highlights the talents and creativity of our participants. This summer we had some members who decided that their talents went better together than on their own. Having never met before the program, these participants put a little Elvis, some Sax, a vocal rhythm track, a traditional Japanese instrument, and a world class voice together to create this amazing rendition of the classic, “Love Me Tender.”