Had a show in the morning, quite good. It took a long time to get the kids going, but once they did it was fine. Actually they were good, I guess I’m just judging them from the shows we’ve had recently where the kids are just fantastic!! You can really tell the difference between a school that has an ALT once a week and one that has an ALT a couple of times a year!

Then in afternoon it was another show. But this time the school decided that they’d change the plan at the last minute and ask us to only do 3rd and 4th years. Unfortunately we can’t do this as if we do it for one school, everyone would want it. Besides, if the kids were like this morning then we really need the 1st and 2nd graders to genki everyone up. So it was into Japanese politics mode. They said “impossible”. So I said, “O I’m really sorry, there must have a communications problem, it’s all our fault”, of course it wasn’t, they’d just decided themselves, but taking the blame off them always helps “let’s try and find a way out of this”. Making sure they had an excuse to back down and I didn’t get confrontational with them. So things were going backwards and forwards and before I knew it they had called in the big wigs from the Board of Education! This was a bit of a surprise, but good news as it meant the school didn’t want to take responsibility, but the BOE people probably could. So after lots of talking and being as polite as possible they decided to do the show for all the kids!! Yeah!!! So lots of smiles all round. And after all the hard work the kids were brilliant. We had a massive sound system, 600 kids and everyone seemed well impressed and was wanting to take the credit for deciding to include all the school years!!

Then in the evening we were taken out for a very nice sushi meal. We were all shattered from the night before, but somehow we managed to get to a karaoke bar!