Going from Memory Now

Well, it turns out I had less pre-written blog entries than I thought. Oh well, I'll try to recount the highlights and also I'll be posting a bunch of the pictures taken while I was on my own in Toyama.

The Company Event
Woke up this morning to go to the company event that had me leave Tokyo early to come to Takaoka. The first thing I encountered was going to CDL early in my morning to my first 朝礼 (chourei), which is a monthly morning pep talk type thing that occurs on the first Saturday of every month. Yep.. had no idea what was going on. I did, however, meet the 社長 (shachou), president of the company Matsubara-san... a man I would soon learn to dread. In any case, they had Kang-san and myself introduce ourselves to the rest of the company and then we recited a bunch of stuff that I don't really recall... except:

出来る。出来る。必ず出来る。出来ないと思えば、出来ない。出来ないと考えず出来ない。

It loosely means "I can do it! I can do it! I can definitely do it! If I think that I can't do it, I can't do it. If I believe I can't do it, I can't do it.

Or something like that. After the morning assembly, we left for the beautiful house that the company event was taking place. To this day, I still have little idea what that meeting was about. A lot of people went up and made presentations about various things, including a concept called LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability), which Shachou-san was very surprised I hadn't heard about. I was still quite tired at this point and there was so much Japanese being spoken that I didn't understand that I must admit I dozed off a little bit, but for the most part, I tried to read the slides as much as possible and follow along.