My speech at the KAI Japanese School 2008 Speech Contest

The Event: KAI Japanese School 2008 Speech Content
The Date: 7 March 2008
The Location: Yoyogi Olympic Centre, Tokyo, Japan

This is a video of me delivering my speech at the KAI Japanese School's 23rd Speech Contest. For the contest, every student in the school prepares a draft of a speech. Then, one student is picked from each class (by vote by the members of that class) to deliver their speech at the contest.

This year there were 17 speakers, hailing from a range of countries including Sweden, China, Korea, Spain, USA, and of course England. The theme for this year's speeches went as follows:

Each student was required to choose a single Japanese kanji character with the reading (pronunciation) of "kai" (that being the name of the school), and then write a speech based around the meaning of that kanji. There are quite a few kanji characters which are read as "kai", with meanings like "ocean", "world", "meeting", "everybody" ... etc. etc. and all of these were fairly popular choices. I chose the kanji character with the meaning "mysterious", "unknown" 「怪」. The title of my speech is 「怪しい虹を追って」 "Ayashii niji wo otte" ("In Pursuit of Rainbows"), and it explores the question of why human beings are so attracted and fascinated to the unknown.

The video starts with the MCs - Matsumoto Tomoko-sensei and Nakamura Naoko - introducing my speech with a bit of chat about rainbows, followed immediately by all 12 of my classmates (bless 'em) invading the stage to hold up a rather awkward paper rainbow, deliver a cheerleading chant of "ganbare ganbare Tim!" ("Do your best, do your best Tim!"), and then finally all turn around to reveal the title of the speech printed on their backs - one character per person!

Category:

Education

Tags:

• kai
• japanese
• school
• tokyo
• japan
• speech
• contest
• 2008
• rainbows
• ayashii
• 怪しい

[lithiumkx]

mad respect m'nigger woo

tino x

[pbkc77]

うわぁ～、懐かしい。

素晴らしいスピーチでしたよね。

congratulations!!!

[mattlancs]

Congratulations on your mad speech skills. All those years of making smalltalk on stage while Shane retuned finally paid off!

I'd like to see a version with subtitles, please.

In fact, I'm almost tempted to make one myself...