Day 4 of the fast and so far, it’s going well. The wakeup calls I get from Sheila in the morning are a definite help! We’ve been meeting on Skype in the mornings to have devotions together after breakfast.

There’s a tradition at Seiryo to play a game of ‘hyaku nin shyu' at the end of the year.

What is ’hyaku nin shyu’? If I understand correctly: there’s a collection of a hundred short poems. Students are placed in groups of 6. Teams will take turns playing against each other. Each group will have one set of the poems placed in front of them. However, the poems on these cards are not written in their entirety. Only the last few words of each poem are written in hiragana (Japanese phonetic alphabet). A judge has a different set of cards where the poems are written in their entirety. The judge chants the poem. The students must recognize the poem, know how it ends, find the card that corresponds to it and slap/grab the card. At the end of the game, the team with the most cards wins.

These poems are written in old style Japanese, so many students don’t understand the meaning, and are sometimes not even able to read the kanjis properly. This game is a way of encouraging the students to learn many of these poems by heart..

There will be about 20 teachers who will be reading poems. Today, I was given the 10 cards that I will be responsible for reading. It should be interesting…!