Freundeskreis Baden-Württemberg

Together with my roommate i took part in a very interesting.... event.
It was the meeting of the "Friends of Baden-Württemberg" (Baden-Württemberg is one of the 16 federal states of Germany, being located in the south, and actually i have nothing to do with this place...) and took place in a conference room in the century hyatt hotel in shinjuku, tokyo....
so my friend and i went to this hotel and had no idea what was expecting us.... We had been asked by some teacher who is married to a german, that's how we got to know about this event...
Well, you could say it was what i would call a FREAK SHOW.
In the room, there were tables and chairs for the audience (all in all approx. 20 people), there was a glass of water for everyone and in the front there was a beamer, connected to a notebook, and there were 4 people sitting, 2 of them japanese, 2 german....
I thought i remembered seeing one of the germans before on tokai university campus, and it turned out he really was a teacher there who, as the japanese man who opened the meeting announced, held his lectures even in japanese!
Wow, we thought, and the whole audience would start some appreciating murmurs... However, it was not his turn yet.
The other german guy would start holding a speech about the Steinbeis career center, a private university in berlin. Well, i can't remember having heard about this great wonderful instutition before.... He was one of the teachers there, and his connection to Japan was simply the fact that every year, the Steinbeis university sends some of their students to Japan for 2 weeks for a special economy class.... He spoke no japanese, so he would hold his speech in english and one of the japanese there would translate everything into japanese.... Haha, ok, that's when i first thought: where's the logic? After all, everyone of the people in that room was either german, or married to a german or in another way connected to germany.... that means, for every japanese there, german was their best foreign language, not english.
So the german guy could have just held his speech in german, then half of the people would have understood it perfectly, the others partly, and at least 8 people could have done the translation...
But english must have been cooler, it seems..... Funny thing number 2: on the foils the guy had prepared, there were MISTAKES!
"baden-württemberg lacked natural resources like coal and steal"
That was my favourite one... His english was pretty... "german"... Sorry, man, i don't exactly think of this school as a "Career Center" if the man who represents it makes such basic mistakes... Of course things like that can happen when you are in a hurry, and i know that, when i'm writing here, i make loads of mistakes as well, but this is private, he is (or should be) a pro, and it was just SO not professional....So this guy, who was obviously wide-sided, as his eyes behind the glasses seemed so BIG, would tell everyone in his funny english about his great career center and how they would take young, intelligent people with a broad social competence and a will to work hard, educate them to a very high level of knowledge as well as practical experience, so that they could leave the school with 24 and fulfill the country's demand for young and competent economists and bla bla, well, you know...
In the end he showed some photos of the classes (those young students just looked like they were the most arrogant brats from rich families you have ever seen, sorry) and also of the goodbye party, one of those photos showed just a huge bowl of sushi.... and he added "i love sushi"... the translator, however, translated this as "and he likes sushi, so if there should be sushi at the banquet, we better all hurry or he'll eat everything before us" and the whole room laughed.....
next was the turn of the german physics teacher from tokai university. He's been living in Japan for almost 10 years now and came from Nagoya to tokai university this spring. And he would hold his speech in japanese.
He started, said 3 words, and my roommate and me instantly KNEW that those next 5 minutes would not exactly be easy for us, and that no matter what happened, we were NOT TO LOOK AT EACH OTHER...
We had to keep ourselves from laughing although this man's japanese was about as bad as it can get. The pronounciation was so HORRIBLY german that it was almost impossible to actually understand what this man was saying... His grammar was only basic level, and he said "ähm", "äh", and even "also" for several times in every single sentence.
I bit my tongue, i pinched my arm.... and i somehow managed to look interested... and i could tell that all the others in this room felt exactly the same way.
OH MY GOD. I don't get how you can live in a country, learn the language from the native speakers and STILL have a german accent. I mean, I'm not talking about a little cute accent here, that'd be only natural, no, I'm talking about an accent that can hardly be called an accent anymore, for it was more like he was forming Japanese words out of German phonems..... And that's bad, guys!

Afterwards the 2 japanese men who sat in the front would talk a bit about the two speeches we had just heard, and ask some questions... Just very simple stuff like "What do you think about the fact that the japanese students sleep in classes?".... The GREAT japanese-speaking teacher would not understand the questions at all....

After this horror-trip was over, we would proceed to another room where there was a buffet, but i didn't really eat much as i was busy talking to the people there.... There were some nice people, of course, but.... seems i attracted the assholes....
So i was caught in a conversation with some german guy who would not stop lamenting about high living expanses in japan and how his brother would live in Düsseldorf (german city in a quite wealthy area) in the best area on a 600m² lot in a house with 300m² living area (YES, he said THAT!) and a Porsche, while he, on the contrary, would not have a car, but then again, other guys living in his apartment house (in Japan) would drive Ferrari and Porsche, well, of course, in germany, he's driving a Porsche as well, so he thinks that it s still a wealthy area where he lives, just that for european standards the apartment sucks....
HELLO? Am i interested in that? My god, this man was SO arrogant! I actually caught myself, thinking, for the first time in my life "Wessi!". (This is how people from former Eastern Germany would talk about people from former Western Germany when they wanted to make fun of them. The word in itself is holding every single prejudice, and there are a lot, about Western Germans there is. As I was a little child when Germany was reunited I was not confronted with those tensions very often, and I did never experience a clear difference in Eastern and Western mentality before. That is why I was so shocked about my reaction, as i had never used that word before, not even in my head.)
Then, later, my roommate and i talked to a young man (about our age) in a suit, who turned out to be the student of some private university... When he told the university's name, wide-sided beady-eyes said "Oh, that's that elite university, right?" and the young student meant "Well, i wouldn't call that elite...", but looked extremely pleased with himself. The young guy was studying japanese for 5 months and had lived one month in japan (2 more to follow), yet he could speak nothing but "hai" and "arigato".... His intelligent questions to my friend were like this:"Ahaaa, so you study japanese and informatics.... what do you plan to do with that?" (his tone was like "do you honestly think you'll find a job with those freak-subjects?", though he seemingly tried to sound very politely interested)
... Sorry, you might find our subject strange, but at least we made it to state universities and are successful in our studies because we are smart.We did not have our daddy buy us in a private institute. (Another thought that I experienced for the very first time that evening.)
When the party was finally over wide-sided beady-eyes would talk to us a bit more and tell us about the goodbye-party of this year's steinbeis-students in japan.... He told us that his students would have been in a traditional tea-ceremony-house, where they started to shout around and ended up fishing the kois (huge gold-fishes, in such an exclusive tea house each one costs at LEAST 50000Euros, and they are just there for decoration) out of the basin.... We asked "How old were those students?" and he said "24-25"...
Remember his speech earlier that day? "Young people with high social competence who will finish their studies with 24".... Not only were those 24-years-old students still far away from graduation, but also socially INCOMPETENT.... That just proved my young theory about private universities in germany....
Then, beady-eyes complained about the high costs for translators during the courses, and asked for our mail addresses in order to contact us, as he thought that it would be a lot cheaper to take german japanology students to japan, as you wouldn't have to pay them that much money and the translations would be japanese-german, not japanese-english-german....
well, thank you.....let's see if that might be some good money....

Well, the business-men and business-man-wannabes went to drink afterwards, but UNFORTUNATELY my roommate and i had to hurry to the station in order to catch the last train home.... (and got ourselves a huge Häagen Dasz on the way)... We had a FUNNY trip home, as we could finally laugh as hard as we wanted and talked a lot about this day..... It was a day that showed us a world which is full of people who are so full of themselves that they don't realize anything at all..... And it also showed us that, no matter how much we hated the arrogance of those people, we were able to fit in there, do some nice conversation and present ourselves in a good way, and that's what counts....

An interesting day.....