End of the Year Party

On Saturday we had the annual end of the year party (忘年会) for my Japanese class. Living for a year in Japan and working at a company at the year I knew all about how parties should be. To be perfectly honest this party was a little disappointing.

The first problem is where the party took place... Hayashi Japanese Grill. When I was going through the earlier classes (before I went to Japan) we held the party at a place called Yamagata. It was by far more authentic. The owners are Japanese and they always made a special menu just for the sake of our party. It was a very relaxed atmosphere and we usually go the entire restaurant to ourselves. Hayashi, however, is a hibachi type restaurant (鉄板焼き）. Speaking from experience, I can say that despite how popular this type of restaurant is in the USA, it is actually quite rare in Japan. It would be appropriate to say that it is "Americanized" Japanese food.

Location aside, the price paid was also pretty steep. $14 got us two sushi rolls, a small bowl of rice and miso soup, a meager portion of hibachi, and also a small bowl of edamame. Novelty aside, I am sure if I went to Yamagata I could get all of this for around $5. Thank god Hayashi had a bar though.


That leads me to my next gripe... there was no alcohol. Anyone that has been to Japan (and isn't a complete social recluse), will tell you that alcohol is a very important part of the culture. An end of the year party or company party without some form of alcohol is unheard of. Now I know I am complaining about impossible stuff here. This is America and it was a party of mainly college students. Of course the instructors can't officially endorse drinking due to the fact that we live in a backwards country where the drinking age is absurdly high. Do you know what everyone did though that was of legal age? They started a tab at the bar. Before the party I went to my friend's house with a few of the other Japanese students and we played drinking games.





To demonstrate how "authentic" Hayashi was, we spoke Chinese to the chefs. Still it was a nice show though.

I have enough to gripe about with how the Japanese program is run at Texas Tech to warrant another blog post so I won't go into that here. All of the setbacks aside, I did enjoy talking with the Japanese people at the party. Kumiko, my language exchange, came and we talked quite a bit.


Like I said at this point I am nitpicking. It was really fun and I think that the instructors made the most of the situation. Part of the reason was that my Japanese had far surpassed 95% of the people in the Japanese program. Whenever the instructors spoke they always used dumbed down textbook Japanese. I did have a few good conversations with the other Japanese people though.

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