Thanksgiving



Our CSU party for November was celebrated on Thanksgiving. Turkeys are not popular in Japan, so one of the students whose dad was in the military had to use her ID to get on a local base and buy some for the party. Of course, there was also some Japanese food and lots of beer. In the above picture from left to right are: Ken Noguchi the nampa (picking up women) master, Tim Sakurai the sakemaster, myself, Ben Yamada the whiskeymaster, and Tim Kennedy the throwin' bonez masta. Tim Sakurai had a tendency to get off to a very fast start, and then become insanely drunk. Knowing this, we used to encourage him to sit next to Dr Aso, the king of strong drinks. That might have been a little cruel, but it was so funny to watch him after about 15 minutes. This photo was taken a little after poor Mr Sakurai had paid a visit to Dr Aso. The highlight of the night, however, was when Dr Aso sang the Waseda University anthem for us.



The above photo is of the responsible drinking section, which is scary. From left to right are: Ian the Kung-Fu man, Dana Franklin the moonshiner and professional slacker Republican, Paul Michaelian the engineer and J-Pop enthusiast, and behind him Steve Luchesi, no comment about him, just plain old Steve. By about this time, we were beginning to get comfortable with living in Japan and speaking the language. It was a nice feeling to be walking to the subway station and being able to read something that you did not understand yesterday. To be able to read a Japanese newspaper, one should understand around 2000 Kanji (Chinese characters). My class taught us 400 during the year, which seemed like a lot. I have heard that it takes about 4 years of living in Japan to really learn the language well, so I'm only about 25% of the way there!



Now we are getting to the wild side of the party. Shown are Mike Uzemek the anime artist, his then girlfriend, myself, Anthony Swanson the loud and unstable Italian Catholic, his friend and chaperone Stacey Difuntorum (she was like the good angel on his shoulder), and a friend of Ian's.

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