Nagasaki seems to have more history than any other city in Japan, from all sorts of eras. From being the 2nd ( and hopefully last ) city to be nuclear bombed, to having some of the first Christian missionary’s – who were then crucified, and being the only place allowed contact with foreigners when Japan was isolated from the world.

Anyway, today I was invited down for the twice yearly “Junshin University English Education Public Lecture”. I was also sharing the billing with Tono Sensei, whom you’ve probably seen as the resident expert on one of NHK’s daily English learning programmes ( it’s the one with the cartoon dude called “Corpus Kun”). Usually a I get a little nervous presenting after University professors as they usually come out with incredible stuff like telling the teachers “The kids don’t have to learn anything, just having fun is OK”, or “Don’t teach things like “What’s your name?” it’s too impolite” to insinuations that if you teach English to your kids they’ll never speak correct Japanese again!

So it was quite a relief to see that Professor Tono is a cool guy and also gave a nice presentation saying lots of good things. The main thrust of it though was his research into the English that Japanese people use. The corpus he has been studying shows things like how Japanese speakers tend to not use “the” correctly, and higher level speakers’ main problem is mistaken use of nouns. The objective is to use this research to help develop new teaching materials.

Then it was my turn, and after a lecture style presentation I was asked to make it as fun and interactive as possible, which is no problem. However although a lot of the people knew Genki English, for most of them it was their first time at a workshop ( lots of student teachers), so I couldn’t only do activities, but did the “Problem Solving” Elementary School workshop where we make all their elementary school English worries disappear! But we did get chance for a few activities including the “What’s your name song”?, “Rocket Launch“, “Where do you live?” and the Where do you live shiritori game. The room was packed ( standing room only!), and they were a fantastic audience. I’ve also been invited to do a 3 hour workshop in Sasebo on August 21st.

Then after lots of chats with teachers it was out for an amazing meal atop one of Nagasaki’s mountains. Gorgeous sashimi and an amazing view of the new bridge lit up in the distance. The craziest thing though was the road up to the restaurant. It used to be a huge staircase leading up to the temple on the top, but in recent years they’ve tarmaced it and made it suitable for cars ( no surprise there then). But… they’ve left all the hundreds of year old trees exactly where they were, which is now slap bang in the middle of the road! You turn a corner and there’s a massive tree just stuck there in your path. Not the sort of thing you want to see heading back down the hill when it’s pitch black! I bet the kids have great fun sledging in Winter though.