American unicyclist in Japan
February 3rd, 2009 by James
A Fukushima TV segment about Adam, an American who rides around on a 36″ unicycle:
“Unfortunately it had rained quite a bit recently, so even though you can’t tell from the video, the ground in the practice area was extremely slick, so you couldn’t really do proper turns or anything involving… having traction.
So I rode around with a bunch of the Japanese elementary school kids and generally had a grand ol’ time.”
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Ha! Thanks for this! As it happens, I know Adam’s translator — he’s a JET (CIR, obviously) from Vancouver, Canada.
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This is my video; I noticed from the YouTube stats that this had been linked here.
To confirm, yes, my helpful friend is Billy, a CIR here in Fukushima.
I posted quite a bit more info about this video over on my site, including some photos of Billy and me when they let us look around the FTV studio.
http://luckyisle.com/unicyclist-on-the-news/
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Wow, bikkuri, gaijin is not painted as a criminal on Japanese media. Honto bikkuri. Besides, he is getting along with Japanese kids. kodomo mo bikkuri!!
There must be subliminal words “gaijin hanzai” embedded on the TV segment.
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Now that was a nice clip, and everyone seemed to have lots of fun.
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Kind of annoying when the host adds those english words.
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There was some nice ads the video.
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To give pioneers their credit, it should be noted that Jack Halpern (春編雀來), Editor in Chief of the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (新漢英字典), one of the best Kanji-to-English dictionaries ever in my opinion, was unicycling as a foreigner in Japan before this guy.
Not that this guy isn’t impressive as well.
When are we going to start covering the jugglers?
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That’s me, so thanks for the good words.
To be even more fair, the International Unicycling Convention and World Championships were held in Tokyo back in 2004, so this is far from the first and will be far from the last.
http://www.unicon12.com/index.htm
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