End of Year Celebration 2012

End of the Year Celebration from Jamie Itokazu on Vimeo.

This is the End of the Year Celebration Talent Show Competition video that I never uploaded before. Sorry its late, but it's here now. Thanks for waiting for it :)

Manoaphobia 2012

Hey! 

I'm finally catching up on posts and I'm nearly back to the present so yay! On August 31 we held Manoaphobia this year. Unlike years past this year's event was way more planned and put together. We also timed it perfectly so that we would get to host Professor Kawasoe's students from Ryukoku University were here and able to see students at the center.

First all the students and most of the adults aside from Professor Kawasoe, who almost got to take a nap, went on a Scavenger Hunt through UH-Manoa.Cara designed the whole scavenger hunt and at least she gave them a map?!?

Here are Cara and Beau showing off the Scavenger Hunt clues. It was a photo scavenger hunt.

The winning team got to eat first and then everyone else got to eat. We had a good spread that night and I'm seriously not kidding. It's never pretty food, but it does taste good.

After dinner we were lucky enough to get entertained by the Ryukoku students first. I'm sorry I don't remember your names at all and I can't find the itinerary either. Here goes though:

First we had one of them show us Iadou,a form of Japanese Swordsmanship.He didn't bring the real sword, but he brought a nice dupe though.

Then the next performer showed us the art of Rakugo, Japanese story telling with minimal objects. He told us  two stories both of which were fairly amusing , although the stories probably sound different when translated from the original language.

The last performer was a Japanese magician, which I'll admit is just as amusing as an English magician.

After the last Ryukoku student performed Cara and Lacy performed a Japanese song for everyone. Umm...yeah I forget what the song was.

There was also a moment when Professor Kawasoe was teaching us to dance and we all danced around the room. When it was all over we had a few closing remarks by Rev. Kevin and Professor Kawasoe before the everyone headed home for the night.

A photo of all the performers

National Parks Founders Day

ahh... Sometimes things come together unexpectedly and amazingly!


On Saturday August 25th The Jr. YBA was invited to do a service project at the Arizona Memorial ( I think it's actually called Valley of the Pacific now?!?) The service project was to teach visitors how to fold origami paper cranes. The Center is trying to change its image from focusing on war to focusing on what happened and how we move to forgiveness and peace. We were also told that people often leave paper cranes at the Arizona Memorial in honor of people.


We had the nicest park ranger help out on this project. She was enthusiastic and really friendly. She even had got some paper crane earrings from the Made in Hawaii Festival from the week before. We taught people to fold paper cranes from 1-3p.m. that day and even though it did not seem that a lot of people came through we taught quite a few people to fold paper cranes including some of the employees that worked at the Center.

This project was really fun and the room where we were teaching people to fold paper cranes was really spacious and had a nice view of the harbor. Hopefully we'll have the opportunity to do this again in the future.

Folding paper cranes and catching up with each other :)

Teaching people to fold paper cranes. Everyone who folded paper cranes that day had the option to keep the paper cranes they had as a memory of their visit.

Paper cranes all mingling together

Gathering 2012

Ahhh....I so suck at blogging for the Fellowship Club. I'll do a catch up from August and then a summer 2012 wrap up post.

Above is a picture of most of the participants of Gathering 2012. This picture was taken on Saturday August 11th. 

Gathering 2012 for those who don't know was suppose to be part of the BSC's 40th Anniversary Celebration and a collaboration with the Shin Buddhist Project of Wahiawa Hongwanji Mission and the Young Adult Retreat IV. The speakers for the conference were Dr. Alfred Bloom, Rev. Koyo Kubose, Dr. Kenneth Tanaka, and Cheryl Lippman Tomita. 

On Friday of The Gathering 2012 Rev. Kevin Kuniyuki conducted a special service to honor the BSC's 40th Anniversary. In attendance, we had 2 former directors Rev.Tatsuo Muneto and Rev. Thomas Okano. Also in attendance that night from Kahuku Hongwanji were Mr. & Mrs. Barbara Tatsuguchi and Mrs. Nancy Kunimitsu and her son. Rev. Kuniyuki announced that night that there would be 2 scholarships for both a PBA student and a student associated with the Hongwanji in honor of Kahuku Hongwanji. Kahuku Hongwanji is closing at the end of the year as previously stated in an earlier entry.

After the service and a tribute to the BSC's 40th Anniversary,The Gathering 2012 commenced with a presentation by former Waikiki School principal Cheryl Lippman Tomita. She presented on Habits of Mind and how she was able to incorporate it into the culture of the school and it has continued on since she has left.

On Saturday the rest of the guest speakers gave their thoughts on Habits of Mind and  then there was a breakout session so that the participants could give their thoughts on Habits of Mind and how they thought it would be able to work in their temple. The guest speakers began with Dr. Alfred Bloom who said that while the 16 Habits of Mind were good and related to  the eight fold path he found 16 principles that would help people get along better in their lives.

Dr. Bloom's talk was followed by Dr. Kenneth Tanaka talked about themes from his book Ocean.  He said that many of the principles still applied to temples and that even if we chose to continue using the Habits of Mind we should continue to have Dharma as the center of the temple.

After Dr. Tanaka gave his talk, Rev. Koyo Kubose related to the audience stories about his father. He used stories about his father's patience with everyone not just some people. How he told Dharma School students  to continually thank their shoes and he said that many students his father taught in those days had come up to him in recent years and told him that they still thank their shoes.

After Rev. Kubose talked all the speakers got together and did a panel discussion. Can I say that as Buddhists we have some really bad jokes?!? No, really we do. But the panel was great nonetheless. 

On Sunday the participants of the Young Adult Retreat joined the Gathering participants for a bit but more on that in part 2

July Fun

I SWEAR that I was just blogging about the end of the school year and yet here I am blogging and another school year is upon us once again! I would be blogging about the Jr. YBA Convention but perhaps another year and another time that will fit into the comprehensive youth program. 

July was a extremely busy month for the Fellowship Club. Well, relatively at the beginning of the month we helped by making and selling musubis at the Moiliili Hongwanji Bon Dance and SummerFest. We also helped Jr. YBA with their shave ice booth which was right next door to ours. 

Josh showing off some of the musubis ready to sell!

Also in July we held another Director's Nite and the theme this time was ninjas. There were ninja ducks, ninja cheese. We made origami ninja stars and watched the movie Shinobi:heart under blade a definite must see.

We also celebrated Suzanne's birthday which was earlier that week. She  really enjoyed her birthday cake because it was just her style.

I'll be back again soon to report on a special collaboration project that we worked on earlier this month that deserved it's own post.

Also if you haven't signed up for the Young Adult Retreat IV, you still have time but you need to contact Jake ASAP if you want to attend. We have also set the date for Manoaphobia and it's going to be August 31. We look forward to seeing you soon!

March mischief...

Hey,

Sorry it's been a while. Things at the BSC have been crazy and I promise that we actually have been doing things and not just sitting around pretending to do things.

In case I didn't mention before, the BSC staff was lucky enough to be invited to see Rev. Yoshiaki Fujitani speak at a presentation of the VVV on February 23. It was quite special to see a film on the VVV and to hear Rev. Fujitani talk about his experiences with the VVV.

As I may have previously mentioned here we took Yuiya Yokoyama to a UH baseball game. What I probably didn't mention was that his father Mr. Wayne Yokoyama gave a presentation on his work as a translator. You can read at least part of his talk here. It's really interesting because he found D.T.Suzuki's orignal introduction to the Kyogyoshinsho! He also briefly mentioned when he visited On March 3 that he's been very busy working and his work is finally coming out, which is quite good news for us!

In March it was also Dwight and Rev. Kevin's birthdays so we celebrated with an M&M ice cream cake. umm...as you can tell there was an incident with breaking the knife. It was a really good birthday for both of them though. There will be more updates to come though and it will be great!

Oh! Also if you are on facebook.We are there too! Link! You should be our fan because if not you are missing out on some interesting stuff not featured on our website or our blog!