Nantanian Kids Festival

One thing that continually surprises me is how vibrant Nantan, the town I live in, seems to be.* There are constant festivals and events that tend to be well attended, at least the ones I've been to. There's a local international society that runs a few events each year, all pretty full. The field trip in Nantan I went on last fall that got my picture in the local paper was one of those events.

I'm also surprised by the number of people who can speak English. Most the people I know who speak English well are older Japanese women who used to live or work in Kyoto or some other, bigger city before moving out here. There's also a woman who is younger and used to live in Chicago.

Last weekend was the "Nantanian Kids Festival". The international society, along with volunteers, set up booths for six countries; South Korea, the US, China, Germany, the Philippines, and Brazil. Each of those was represented by someone from that country, except for possibly the Philippines. Children paid some small entrance fee and were given a 'passport' with pages for each of the countries. Each page had basic greetings in that country's language, how to count to ten, and a short quiz about history or geography that could be answered by looking at things inside the booth. There was also some 'money' in the back that could be used to buy snacks from each country.

Naturally, I was working in the America booth. We had face painting, which I hadn't thought of as an American thing before someone mentioned it:



These are some of the decorations we put up:



As I said before, these events tend to be well attended and this was no exception. At several points I found myself essentially unable to move and had to stay in one place for a prolonged period of time:



This picture will surely haunt me if I ever take LSD and look at the Statue of Liberty**:



*Really though, I don't know what I'm talking about. I can't accurately compare Nantan to other small towns in Japan, or in America even. It just seems different from what I would expect and anything I say is purely anecdotal.

**In Japanese the Statue of Liberty is called the Goddess of Liberty, which always struck me as odd.