What contest?!

Wednesday was the Iwaki City Inter-Junior High School English Oratorical Contest. Around 50 girls and boys from each JHS around the city gathered at Alios, the local arts theatre, and recited speeches in English. 30 something of them recited a peice from English textbooks, and 17 of them recited original speeches they wrote themselves.

As expected the textbook-recitation section had lots of students repeating the same speeches. Except for a few, just like my dear darling student N-chan, who recited the emotional 'The Diary of Anne Frank'. We had practiced hard for a good 2 months, and N-chan herself had put so much effort into perfecting each word and expression. We had lots of extra lessons over the summer holiday, she practiced at home, and on top of that she had to go to juku (cram school) everyday and ballet lessons most days. Not to mention all the summer homework the school piled on her.

Yesterday finally came. All that hard work was going to pay off and make everyone proud. And she did make us proud, by doing a wonderful recital, full of Anne Frank-esque emotion and energy, finishing and pronouncing each word perfectly, and didn't go too fast or slow, didn't stutter, didn't stop, didn't slur over any words. It was a work of art. We were so confident that she was going to walk out with a prize or something.

We were wrong.

She didn't even make it to the top 6.

We were stunned we didn't hear her name when they were announcing the top 6.

At the end of the whole thing, when I waiting outside to meet up with her, I saw this teary red-eyed girl approaching, and my heart sank even more and was even more disappointed at the verdict. I thought it was impossible that she didn't win. I felt so bad, so sorry. Before the contest we were so confident and kept reassuring her that she'd come out with flying colours. I felt we had lifted her hopes too high. All that hard work....!

Turns out 4 out of 5 of the judges were actually Japanese, and there was only ONE native English speaker. What kind of English Oratorical Contest do you call this?! Where 80% of the judges don't even speak the language fluently..!? It really wasn't very fair.

But hey, this is Japan.