Teacher lottery

Last October during Nishimachi's annual Food Fair, Lucinda won the teacher lottery -- that is, we bought raffle tickets and Lucinda's name was selected -- to spend a few hours with her Japanese teacher, Noriko Hayashi. Lucinda has always been impressed by Hayashi-sensei ("sensei" means teacher), who has been at Nishimachi for (I think) more than 30 years.

Hayashi-sensei is very good at origami and very precise in teaching the children how to write hiragana - and Lucinda loves doing both of those things. So we planned the lottery get-together so they could do crafts together at the Tokyo Metropolitan Children's Hall near Shibuya.

In honor of the day, Lucinda wore her favorite dress, which my mother and Lucinda made together last summer.


In the paper art section, they noticed a box of paper "sushi" and decided to make their own set. Hayashi-sensei folded some flat cardboard into a box. Then, using paper, tissue paper, and styrofoam for the rice, they made a crab roll, cucumber roll, tuna roll, tuna sushi, rice and tofu sushi, and a pair of "hashi" (chopsticks).

Lucinda was very proud of the finished project.


Lucinda carefully and neatly wrote the hiragana on the chopstick; it says "o te moto," which means "king hand formally" - which really means that Blaine and I can't figure it out.