Adam's Japanese Journey: USA Summer Camp!

Throughout the summer of 2014, I worked at various summer camps in Japan helping teach English with 13 other American Counselors, one American Director, a Japanese Director, and two Japanese counselors.

The male : female ratio was 2:7, and I was totally okay with that! We came up with fake drama for the campers, and I was “married” to different girls on my team at most of the camps. It got pretty crazy at the last camp when I had to choose between my current wife (and our baby named Stefan) and my mistress… Well, I chose my mistress, and that stirred up even more fake drama. But I was just doing my job and entertaining the kids, right?

Anyway, we did various activities at each camp, like “dance party” which is exactly what it sounds like: a crazy-fun sweat fest with American music blaring in the background… except for the one camp where we didn’t have a great speaker system, and the disc skipped. But we improvised, and it turned out to not be a complete disaster. The kids said that they still had fun, which is what was important at the end of the day.

Another activity that we did at most of the camps was called “American Carnival.” We had a bunch of different stations set up, ranging from the tattoo parlor to the Ball Toss. I was in charge of the ball toss event, and let me tell you, it’s a great way to work up a sweat, especially when the kids missed the target completely and I had to run to retrieve the ball. It was all fun, though, and I honestly miss running this station.

We also had the “My Story” competition. The campers would write a 1-3 minute story about themselves (or a fictional character that they’d pretend to be) and they’d have to memorize it and present it to everyone at the end of camp. At the third camp, I helped one of the high school kids take second place out of over 40 campers, and he said that he couldn’t have done it without me. He’s a bright kid, and I’m sure he could have done well on his own, but I’m glad that I was able to help him do so well. He gave me a red keychain that says 私がやらなきゃ誰がやる on the front side and 責任感 on the back side. I kept it on my phone case from the middle of July until January 18, 2015, the day I upgraded to a new phone, and the case that I bought didn’t support the keychain.

We did a bunch of other fun activities, too, and I made so many great friends on my trip. I’m going to continue blogging about my time in Japan, but this is the only post that’s going to be entirely dedicated to the work that I did. More posts are on the way! I want to keep talking about my trip, so I hope that you’re interested in learning more about it. Here's some additional pictures with captions!