Yosakoi!

Good evening everyone!

The weather here has been absolutely beautiful, 75 degrees and sunny for the past week and a half straight. Couldn't have asked for anything better after an 8 month winter. I've only got maybe 7-8 weeks left here in Hokkaido, so I've got to enjoy what I can right?

This morning I had an unexpected visitor actually, not sure what their names are in Japanese but one of these was in my room, and woke me up this morning.

Follow the link to see pics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet

A giant Asian hornet, or at least the Japanese version. It was honestly enormous. Maybe 2-3 inches long, its stinger was the size of a quarter. According to our friends over at wikipedia these critters kill around 40 Japanese every year, though most of them die because they are allergic. I'd rather not find out. Anyway, I swapped it with a folder and through him back out the window, and went back to sleep. What a morning.

After that I met with a couple of my group members to discuss the topic of our final presentation. It's a pretty international group, with a Japanese student, a Russian student, and Chinese student, and me. Due to the fact that I'm the only native speaker of English a little bit more of the responsibility falls upon me, but that's okay as long as the other group members pull their own weight. We decided to try to research 2 topics. One being training practices of Japanese companies, and the other being a case study of Nestle Japan. Since I work with guys from Nestle, I figured I might try to make use of that connection to get some inside looks at Nestle Japan, and see how it works. I'm going to propose the research to them on Tuesday night, hopefully they will go through with it.

This past Thursday, one of Hokkaido's most famous festivals started up again, it is called Yosakoi. Yo as in yohan, sa as in supplemental, and koi as in the fish. It is a dancing festival that was actually invented at Hokkaido University, and I have to admit it is really cool. There are about 75 teams that came to compete, and I only got to see maybe 20 of them in the 3 hours that I watched. People of all ages were dancing, to serious or joyful songs, it was really a sight to behold. You wouldn't see anything like this in America. I've taken a bunch of videos and will try to upload them on to youtube, but they are really large file sizes so I don't know if it will work to be honest, I will get back to you guys on that.