Lisa Rolston - Marlborough Girls College
Attended 2008 Program

Going to Japan on the Labo-Lets Homestay exchange was the most amazing experience of my life. I know that’s in a way to be expected, I mean, Japan for three weeks! And no parents! Epic.  But this particular trip has got to be the best NZ-Japan exchange available. There were 4 exchanges to Japan that people from my school went on, and there is little doubt in my mind that the Labo-Lets Homestay one was by far the best option. Not that I’m biased or anything...

There were 14 of us, plus our two chaperones, sourced from Tauranga, Rotorua and Blenheim, which I think worked pretty well. On the first day in Auckland us Blenheim people hung out in a pack, but by the end of the trip we had all mixed and scrambled up and made friends with those North Islanders as well.

Upon our arrival at Narita Airport the most commonly heard phrase was “Oh my God, we’re in Japan!!” followed closely by “Check out the Japanese toilets!”  We crowded into these Japanese toilets armed with cameras.  Within 10 minutes of being in the country one person who will remain anonymous managed to press the panic button in the disabled toilets.

No truer words have been spoken than those said by Kimberlie, our chaperone, in my video-clip interview: “Look out Japan, they’re here…  We stayed a night in a posh-looking hotel in Shinjuku. The toilets here had cool buttons too. These were experimented with.

After an orientation at the hotel in Shinjuku, five special people (me included) were taxied to Shinjuku station. We were special coz our host families lived miles away and we had to catch trains to find them.

Three of us ended up in the same area. We became the Numata Buddies and shared a lot of experiences together, like Labo parties, school and tea ceremonies.

I knew I was going to get along great with my host sister when we went to a massive supermarket and cruised the chocolate snack aisle. “Chocorate, chocorate, chocorate,” she said, sticking jaw-dropping amounts of chocolate snacks into the basket.

We went to school. I was sitting there in my desk before school, talking to my host sister and feeling conspicuous in my mufti and my nationality, and a girl walked in the door, took one look at me and jumped backwards into a wall.

English was when I first encountered "The Question".  I was asked to introduce myself and my country, with the sensei translating for the class when I let my English get too technical. Then it was question time, and a girl down the back stuck her hand up and asked “Do you have boyfriend?”
Yep, that’s The Question.

We also got to clean the toilets after school. Me being a visitor and all, I didn’t have to clean the actual toilets. They let me scrub a wet floor and send a whole lot of gross down the drain.
We went shopping on Emperor’s Birthday. That was awesome, it was me, my host sister and 2 of her friends. We took purikura, played air hockey, took more purikura and talked about boys. I didn’t feel like the foreigner, that was the best part.

I knew the Japanese didn’t celebrate Christmas so I expected to be a sad little homesick mess that day. Hell no! My host sister got me up at 5am and we caught a bus to Tokyo Disneyland with one of the Numata Buddies and her host sister. Beats sitting round a lounge with a bunch of relatives eating too much food, I can tell you.

Labo camp was amazing! It snowed on the first day of activities and we built snowmen and other snow things. On the second day was the Lets Get Together, which was us and a bunch of Japanese kids greatly enthused to talk to us, play Kiwi games and give us their name cards. Following this lovely NZ-Japanese bonding session, in free time there was an NZ vs Japan snowball fight.
Of course. The Japanese won, because of their numbers, but we had awesome infrastructure. We had walls and caves and tunnel things.
I can say one of the greatest moments of 2008 was charging through knee-deep snow towards the Japanese front line with a handful of snow yelling “KONNICHI WAAAAAA!!!”

On New Years Eve I went shopping with my host sister and 2 more of her friends in a massive mall called Keyami Walk. Woot.
We went to a shrine sometime after 11. We rang a little bell, threw 5 yen coins into a pit, shivered, stood next to the fire in need of warmth, then went up to this bell tower thing. My host sister rang a big gong, then my host brother (My host brother rang a big gong, my host sister didn’t ring him) and then I rang it. I worked out later I hit that thing at exactly midnight. Happy New Year! GONGGG. My host family took me to Tokyo for some sightseeing. We saw Tokyo Tower, the Imperial Palace, Asakusa and Harajuku.

The end part of the trip was also where this exchange shone above others. There was no sitting in our hostel feeling sorry for ourselves after leaving our host families. We took taxis to Harajuku (Harajuku!) and got into groups (size didn’t matter, we chose our own and stuffs) and were given 1500yen and 4 unsupervised hours in which to do whatever we wanted. At night. 5-9pm. It was, as you can imagine, awesome.

The next day we talked a bit and went to Meiji-Jingu shrine, then boarded our fat tall green bus and went to Narita Airport. More free time was had at Narita, we went through country-leaving procedures, and farewelled the country that had become home to us all for three weeks.
Yep, that trip was amazing.