The visit to the junior high school was fun. It made me nostalgic for my junior high school years, but it was also interesting to watch Rosie and the others from overseas eating lunch and helping with the classroom cleaning at a Japanese public middle school, a sight both strange and not strange at all.
      I wish we had had the chance to discuss our impressions of our visit to the Peace Park on the main Okinawan island. I'm sure that the participants had different views based on the environment they were from, and above all, I wanted to hear Bai Yun and Kosoo's candid thoughts about it.

I was worried about my family's English ability, but contrary to my expectations, they were able to communicate fairly well. I was comforted to see my younger sister—whose English is especially hopeless—getting on well with Rosie because they had a favorite movie star in common. Rosie seemed to have enjoyed her tour of Tokyo with my mother, and when they went for a ride in a rickshaw in Asakusa, the other tourists apparently had quite a hoot. (She was wearing a Japanese school uniform then, so it must have been a rare sight.)

Rosie and I were always surrounded by different people. We didn't make a special introduction at [the school] chapel, but through word of mouth, there were always people crowding around us. The junior high school students seemed to have the greatest interest; later I was bombarded with questions from my kohai. Above all, the fact that Rosie was not only cute but was also wearing a uniform seemed to make people stare.

It made me really happy that even after we came back to Tokyo and Yokohama, we all got together and went to Tokyo Disneyland because we were so lonely being apart from each other after having been together all the time during our stay in Okinawa. It's almost strange that the fourteen participants, who speak different languages, were able to grow so close. It's so surprising, because the Japanese students hadn't met each other until six months ago, not to mention the seven students from abroad. Also, the English-speakers' dispute over whose English pronunciation is the best was very amusing.

Needless to say, communication was the most difficult. Since we were making a webpage on the topic of environment, the technical terms were especially difficult. Our electronic dictionaries proved very valuable. In our day-to-day communication, we barely had any problems.

The fact that the students from abroad made the effort to give their presentations in Japanese. It made me happy that they practiced really hard to pronounce difficult words. Up until then, I was always in the position of having to learn a new language, thinking that if I had been born in an English-speaking country, life would've been much easier. But witnessing people who are studying Japanese with my own eyes was a refreshing experience.

I think I've become more active. I've always been a relatively active person, but I think I've become increasingly so. I was always good at talking to new people, but not so much at growing close to them, but through this experience, I think I've learned to do that.

I think it will give me confidence when I learn a new language, not only because of the fact that I was able to talk with foreigners, but because of the sense of comfort that comes from having seen with my own eyes that there are foreigners who are trying to study a new language, just like I am. It's difficult to put into words, but I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders after I realized that a foreign language is difficult for anyone, not just for me. What I learned was this: foreign languages are hard. But even without being able to speak fluently, one can make friends.

Now that I think about it, this program was ofu-kai (offline meeting) on a very large scale. Until we went to Okinawa, we only knew each other through the Internet. It was at the airport that we first met each other in the flesh. I thought, this must be what ofu-kai, in which people who meet on the Web meet in person, is like. Nowadays, much has been made of the dangers of the Internet, especially of relationships between anonymous people. But these ten days were an example of global connections born out of the Internet. It struck me that this is the use for which the "dangerous" Internet was really intended. Some of the participants were quite different in person from the impressions I had of them on the Web. That, of course, is another thing that makes the Internet interesting. Even if we meet on the Internet and then meet in the flesh, I think that being able to say "it's best to meet in person after all" is the way relationships should be. I hope that I will be able to meet the thirteen participants again.