Last week, part 2 - Super Shitsurei

So Friday I had my first really big shitsurei, when I was late to the dinner party for Peter’s rotary club. I thought my okaasan said that we were going to meet up at 6:30, so I decided to exchange my JR rail pass voucher and book my ticket back to Tokyo. Finished up at 6:20ish, so I felt pretty good about making it on time. But it turns out that the party was to start at 6:30 – my okaasan had wanted to meet up at around 6. I ended up being about 5 minutes late to the dinner, which might not seem like much by American standards, but is hugely disrespectful in Japan. I think I spent most of the evening trying to apologize to the people at my table in wonderfully broken Japanese (already suck +freaking out about offending everyone = amazing levels of retardation). Even though everyone said it was ok, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. Gah. I felt horrible afterwards. I’m not sure if my host mom is still offended or not. Ahhhhh!!!
In other news, the independent study presentation is Tuesday. It’s going to be such a terrible time for everyone, but especially me. My topic is Shintoism and Jinjyas in Hakodate, but I have virtually no information. I did three interviews, one of which was my host mom. Plus, my project became significantly less ambitious as the weeks progressed and I realized both 1) how little Japanese I understood, especially when talking about God and the afterlife, and 2) how much work it would take to actually research it. I started out planning to investigate how Shinto was able to survive after Buddhism and Christianity came to Japan, especially focusing on how it blended with Buddhism (most Japanese people are Shinto, but practice Buddhist rites for deaths and such). As the weeks went on, however, I simplified it down to the point where it’s now a presentation about etiquette in a jinjya and the format of the service. It’s so terrible and unprofessional. Plus, I haven’t practiced my presentation at all. It’s going to be miserable. Luckily, most of the other kids seem to have BSed their projects to roughly the same extent, which is some solace. But there are the few kids who actually have really intense and legit projects: Max focused on the upcoming election, interviewing politicians and analyzing Hakodate’s governmental framework, while Victor did a cross-analysis of Hakodate’s agriculture in the literary realm and in practice (I think – I didn’t really understand his explanation). Gah. It’s going to be terrible.
Plus, the speech contest is Friday. Not only is my speech now twice as long (thanks to sensei’s edits), my okaasan invited a bunch of her friends to come see me talk. Now I can make a fool of myself in front of the entire town, yay!