I got up early this morning and headed off to the Maruzen presentation. I got things set up and hung around to watch one of the other publisher’s presentations.

Oh dear. This is the culture shock again, but the teachers just looked dead, there weren’t half as many as expected, they weren’t getting really simply things, the presenter was going on about how different Japanese people are to everyone else, and even the CDs they were selling had weird English, or at least it sounded weird to me after 3 months out of Japan, do we ever say “I’ll have a bit of vegetables”??? So I couldn’t stay in the room, this sort of stuff is just so far behind the rest of the World!

So I popped into Starbucks then another coffee shop to do some more work on CD5. It was actually really boring work, cutting up dozens of words for the software. And I was thinking, this is just daft, putting all this effort in for people who don’t care. But a few people popped in for a chat, which was nice and around 2:30 I started rehearsing the new songs for today. And that did actually get me quite genki. The “I can do it?”, food and “How do you say?” songs really do pick you up!

Then at 3:30 I was on, and I was totally in the attitude of “look, in Germany they read Shakespeare after studying English for 4 years, let’s kick Japan into the 21st century!” and they went for it! I started off with “Good Morning” which worked very well. The best thing was that there was a bunch of kids down the front and they were mega genki and totally into the song, even though I’d never seen them before!! But after such a hectic start the adults were starting to look a little tired, so I dropped the pace with the Easter Song. The thing was that the adults started looking really happy about this, but the kids just looked bored and started asking for more genki stuff! So I duly obliged and did the “This week” song from CD5, and they loved it! This song is the “Left and Right” song of CD5! When I was testing this song I deliberately put in breaks to make sure all the kids could keep up, but today they just plowed through those and sung each line four times in the space it was supposed to take to do 2!!

Then a quick tour through the CD Owners Club, and everyone was especially impressed with the months cards, where I was explaining that Genki English isn’t about making “good Japanese people”, it’s about making the kids into “good people” – full stop!

Then it was on to the food song, which worked great, except for the fact that they only realised it followed the alphabet later on, which got many smiles, albeit a little late!! Then I had a quick run through the phonics CD and I’d forgotten I hadn’t done this CD in Kyoto before as they were lapping it up, especially the James Brown and Fatboy Slim style tracks!

So to finish off there was only one choice, as the whole theme of GE presentations is “dekiru, dekiru, dekiru” then the final song is the new “I can do it!” song, which worked really, really well, especially the actions and the “yeahs!”. So that was cool and a great presentation. Most people already had the Superpack, but the phonics CD was new so we sold quite a few of those and afterwards everyone was asking when CD5 will be out ( hopefully around April 20th), so Maruzen should be happy with those sales.

Now it’s time to get the Shinkansen down to Fukuoka for another presentation first thing tomorrow morning!