The New York Sophist

We returned to Tokyo energized from our encounters and debates, but physically exhausted. A day off was in order, and we spent it shopping in Akihabara district for souveniers. Of course, it wasn’t my crazy love of anime and japanese pop culture that helped select that particular location for our day of tourist activities, no way.

The next evening we were to visit a Toastmaster’s club to give a demonstration debate in parliamentary style. The club is considering starting a debate portion of their activities, and wanted some introductory training. Professor Ayabe conducted the demonstration debate, then split the group up into 3 rooms to have practices on the same motion judged by the Americans. My group was fantastic, and made many good arguments. They also all ended perfectly on time even without the use of a timer. Toastmaster’s is good for training in time management as well as introductions and conclusions to speeches. The only element that needed more work was refutation, as well as argument and impact development. Many of them ended arguments with an open question rather than a concrete impact.

Overall it was a great session, and I think that the Toastmaster’s club will have a lot of future debates where they can quickly learn how to make well developed arguments.

Another fantastic stop! The city was amazing and I took many pictures. We were met by a most enthusiastic group of University students from the English Speaking Society. They took us to the hotel, then it was off to lunch!

Looks delicious no? I forget what it is called but it translates to “fried favorite.” This dish is prepared on a grill, and consists of noodles and some egg I think, with your favorite items inside of it. It’s like a Japanese noodle-fried pizza. I chose garlic and squid for mine, but there were many options. You can get whatever you wish.

After this, it was time for sightseeing where I nearly died, but I did get some great photos of an ancient Japanese castle.

Here’s my video showing the danger we were in:

And here is my nice video of the great city view you get from the chair lift. It does seem to be a postmodern art project though with the weird people floating by in the chairs going the other way. I wasn’t able to record the other direction since we left so late the chair lift had shut down. We took the gondola back, which you can see near the end of this video:

The debate was fantastic, and the most American style debate so far. There was a Topicality debate and some off-case theory debate that was pretty good. I have a tape of it that will be processed after I return to the U.S. I wish I had that macbook up and running at full capacity. I could process videos while I sleep!

After the debate, the students were kind enough to take us out for more sightseeing. This time it was to a hot-spring bath house, one of the oldest (if not the oldest) in Japan. This bathhouse was the inspiration for the one in the film “Spirited Away,” a famous animated film in both America and Japan.

After trying some salt-flavored ice cream, it was time to head all too soon to the airport and back to Tokyo. It was a very fast, but very fun time here!

Thanks to the students of Ehime University for a fantastic time!

Well, it might be more than the halfway point, but here are some reflections from the participants in the 2009 Japan-U.S. debate exchange so far. More to come!

Our debate against Tokai University was very good, and it was one of the few in a pure parliamentary style. The motion was to ban the ownership of cellphones by minors in Japan. The debaters were very skilled, one being from Taiwan and able to speak several languages, and the other a very brilliant law student who had quite a nice WUDC style to his speech. The speech times were shortened, so there was not a lot of time for vigorous POIs, but that was ok as the arguments were of high quality. It was a very good debate and I think thee students who were watching learned a good deal about the format and the issue.

Parliamentary debate, it was explained to me, is growing in popularity, but it is not a part of JDA (The Japanese Debate Association). Since it is purely up to students to arrange practice, team logistics, and tournaments, the growth of parliamentary debate in Japan does not match its popularity. I was happy to see points of information and more typical parliamentary structure in the debate.

Tokai University debate is under the direction of one of the most dedicated, organized and on-top-of-it guys I know – Isao Ayabe. He is amazing. Not only does he happily teach more classes than anyone I know, he also works long hours trying to promote debate in Japan. He hosts club meetings, and other events (tonight we are going to his Toastmaster’s event to help teach debate there) and travels quite a bit doing the hard work of debate promotion. He is always happy, never tired, and is always genuinely glad to discuss debate with anyone. He’s pictured above on the right, two down from where I am (I’m the blonde in case you don’t know).

Tokai took us out to a fantastic Japanese dinner with wonderful drinks. One or two of the students chatted with me about the U.S., including one student who wanted to know all about jazz bars, what they are like, who goes to them, and how many they are. He thought they sounded “romantic” and wanted to go.

It was a great night, followed by a too early flight to Fukoka. So yes, I’m posting out of order. Oops!

Getting back to my roots here – just read a good, if older, post about academic blogging. Some of the concerns in that article mirror the great concerns raised by Gordon Mitchell in his fantastic recent post on the 3NR blog.

Why do I blog? It’s clearly for me to think through questions, but often times it is for me to imagine an audience and write for them, like a journal or diary I guess. It also, hopefully, will spur some conversation or thought among those who happen across it. But mostly it’s for me to share my recent thoughts with those who read this. Hopefully they might make a comment.

But recently it has been historical in nature, documenting the American debate exchange, which is super-fun!