MATSUSHIGE, Tokushima Pref. -- "It began with a cold," Lance Kita, 24, replied when asked how he came to teach hula in Japan. Kita, raised in Hawaii, had never taught or even performed the dance native to his home state before coming to Shikoku, Japan's least visited major island.
Kita arrived in Matsushige, Tokushima Prefecture, a small farming community, in 1998 with a ukelele, a boogie board and a one-year contract to teach English on the Ministry of Education's JET Program. In addition to assisting with classes at the local junior high school, he had ample opportunity to participate in town activities. As a foreigner, he was automatically made a member of the Matsushige International Association. The group holds an annual event to promote intercultural understanding -- such as the international dance program in which Kita was invited to take part.
Kita decided to ask Jeanette Tom, a fellow Hawaiian, to join him for a hula demonstration. He would play the ukelele and sing in Hawaiian; Tom would dance. Unfortunately, a few days before the show, he came down with a cold and lost his voice. Since he couldn't sing, Tom insisted that he dance with her and she taught him a hula in three days.