Superstar!

Lots of training happened.. and I mean a lot.

A common practice that we have accustomed ourselves to, is taking a sheet of paper, making about fifty to one hundred lines on it, and then checking off one line every time we play through our tournament piece. -- Time consuming, but it gets you prepared.

Despite all of the seemingly bland goings on, one glaring granule of immense interest remains; Shamisen Superstar, Masahiro Nitta, arrives in town today! YAY!

So, like all great friends would do in this situation -- we take the vacuum and 

the brooms out of 

the closet again, and prepare to repeat our trick we played on Mike! Mwhahaha! (It was just too funny the first time, so we couldn't help ourselves).

>>>Fast forward one hour.

I'm sitting in the closet writing my blog (a guy has to keep himself occupied, y'know). They are telling Masahiro that I am out buying beer. Eventually, Kevin comes up to the door, asks in Japanese "have you ever wondered what's in this closet?" and opens it. The best part was that

 Masahiro was actually leaning in to look and then ]BAM[ surprise! We laughed, we cried, it was beautiful.

In honor of the mighty Masahiro's arrival, Kevin's parents had an expensive sushi dinner delivered to their house. It had unagi, rice, and many rolls. Oishikatta desu yo!

After dinner, to my surprise, we had a special guest. His name is Bailey, 

he is fourteen years old, and he just started playing Tsugaru Shamisen! 

The strangest thing about it, is that he is an american. Obviously his family is a military one, but that doesn't make it any less interesting that he decided to play Shami.

He is a bit reserved at first.. understandably so, due to the fact that we are all older than he is and much more experienced. But we definitely did our best to make him feel at home, and gave him a bunch of tips, and also played a little concert for him.

I think he was pretty inspired... although sitting in the same room and listening to the best Shamisen player in the world will do that to just about anyone..

Anyway, since this was the night before the tournament, we held a mini competition including Kevin, (The Legend) Mike Penny, and I, just to test our nerves. I played decently, but more work was still to be done.

The remainder of the night was spent working out some of the final details of my performance and hoping for the best.

Oyasumi Nasai.