This past weekend, we were invited to present Uncharted Japan at the annual Japanese New Year event hosted by the Japan Outreach Initiative in Knoxville, TN. JOI is a cross cultural program of the Japanese government to increase knowledge of Japanese culture in the United States. The local director is Mana Muramatsu who has lived in Knoxville the past year and a half. She and others produced a wonderful event in which more than 200 persons attended.
It started off with a demonstration by the Nashville Taiko Drummers at Market Square, then moved indoors to the East Tennessee History Center where visitors were able to sample Japanese sake, hands on stamp making, mochi pounding, and shamisen demonstrations among other things. We heard from local dignitaries including Shinji Watanabe, the Consul General for Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee along with the Mayor of Knoxville and others.
Josephine and I were honored to be able to have a table set up where we presented our Youtube Channel to guests which resulted in many interesting conversations with those who had been to Japan and those who are going. As part of our presentation, we offered a giveaway of $20 Starbucks gift cards for the random winner of the drawing if the names of two locations in two videos were identified correctly. The correct answer for our Nagoya video (click here to watch) was the SCMAGLEV Museum and the correct answer for our Mojiko video (click here to watch) was the Friendship Memorial Hall.
The winners of these two were Janine Gerber for the Nagoya video and Christopher Quindo for the Mojiko video. Congratulations to these two winners!