All told, I rotate between four middle schools and around nine or so elementary schools. Back when I first arrived in Japan my reputation for unicycling sometimes preceeded me (apparently word travels fast), so it wasn’t uncommon for me to show up to a school and they already start asking me about unicycles. This particular story isn’t one of those.

During my self-introduction, which is for obvious reasons always the first thing I do for a class, I show a photo of me riding my 36″ unicycle and talk a little about it. At this particular school they were, as is usual surprised and had lots of questions. Where this school broke from the norm is when they said hey, let’s take a break and go to the gym so you can ride with the students. I said sure, why not.

Every elementary school here has a large cache for 50 or so unicycles, and it’s commonplace for kids to be riding them around the playground and gym. I grabbed the biggest one (which was still too small for me), then headed into the gym. Soon the gym was full of a gaggle of young Japanese elementary school unicyclists, then one big foreign unicyclist.

Their unicycles weren’t all that great, and it was almost impossible to turn or stop on the gym floor because it was amazingly slippery. Anything more than just going straight would result in the tire slipping away from under you. I quickly got used to it, but many kids continued to intermittently suddenly slide and fall.

While we were all zooming through the gym, the vice principal grabbed a camera and snapped a bunch of photos of us for the school newspaper or whatever. I gave him my email address and asked him to send them to me.

It all eventually came to an end, but that half hour or so of fun in the school gym was about the best time I’ve had so far with kids from one of my schools. It was a damn good day.

The VP never emailed me the photos, and after waiting a few months I simply gave up. This was until about a month or so ago when one of my school suddenly said they had received a package from one of my other schools, and I received a photo book with a bunch of pictures from that day in it.

Cool. It’s a really cool souvenir of that day.

Good day.

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