1. Masaaki - Your Innocence Betrays the Truth
This is my favorite one. The crying dog in the lower-right hand corner is
saying "samishi yo", which is a lonely kind of sad. He is also saying I am moved to cry, "nakeru." But the best part is the blackboard with the first
part of the English alphabet written on it. "A B C D E F C H J K" ...argh!
What the hell kind of sensei was teaching these kids anyway?
2. Shiho - The Least Annoying Junior Highschool Kid Ever
This is the only Junior Highschool student card I bothered to scan in, the
rest are all Middle School kids. She was one of my favorite students, even
though she was really shy, she wasn't shy in the "I'm going to strangle
the bloody answer out of you" kind of way. So rock on Shiho, and don't take
any shit from little Miss talks-a-lot-in-fast-Japanese girl sitting in front of you.
3. Makiko - Bonus Points for Emoji
This is one kind of crazy card. In the upper-right hand corner it just says
"Nihon!", with no apparent context to lend it reason. Maybe to contrast with America? Also she spelled "sayounara" wrong ^^;. How sweet.
4. Asuka - Actually Not so Thoughtful
This one is pretty generic, and woefully lacking of blatant grammatical errors. Ah well, there's a picture.
5. Nae(?) - Crazy Drawings
That teddy bear on the right looks hella pissed I'm leaving. Then we look to the left and see the stress has killed him and he's now ascending as an angel to teddy bear heaven. How epic.
6. Kazakiyo - Pick a Language Buddy
This letters starts in some kind of romajii writing system then morphs into all katakana. During the Meiji period there were talks of switching the writing system away from Chinese characters and adopting all romajii or even katakana. Reading Kazakiyo's letter reminds us "thank freaking god that didn't happen."
Conclusion
Maybe my comments don't show it, but I really did have a great time with these kids. Even though they were basically forced to make these cards it meant a lot to me. Somehow it's really cool to seem myself being talked about in children's Japanese. It made me think it might be fun to work with kids more in the future. We'll see.