Recently I did a post about square dance "dangles" and how I had just received my first one.

For those who may not have seen that post, dangles are small items hung from a dancer’s nametag that signify various things, such as offices the person holds or has held, special dances that the person has attended, or just things that the person finds fun. The latter are known as "fun dangles."

Sometimes pins are used for the same purpose, and I recently received a pin (pictured), which now also adorns the vest I wear when I’m dancing.

The occasion on which I received it was a recent International Friendship Dance that was held here in San Diego between local American dancers and a group of dancers from Japan.

Some of the Japanese dancers were giving out pins to commemorate the event, and I was lucky enough to receive one. The pin has two flags on it, one of which says (in Japanese) "Nippon," which is the Japanese word for Japan, and the other of which is the Japanese national flag.

It was a very well attended dance. We had almost fifty squares (a square is eight people) crammed into the auditorium. The room was so packed that squares were jammed right up against each other, and there were even squares dancing in the foyer to relieve a bit of the pressure.

Most of the dancers, of course, were Americans, but at least three squares were visitors from Japan. The local Japanese dancers who live in San Diego (there are several) were also there, and it was nice seeing them serving as a bridge between the two dance communities.

Most of the dancers didn’t speak each others’ languages, but some did, and I got a chance to practice a little of my Japanese (which is very rudimentary), saying "Kon ban wa" ("Good evening") and "Sumimasen" ("Excuse me") and things like that, to the delight of the Japanese folks I was dancing with.

There were three callers at the event, all of them with international reputations: Ken Bower of California, Bob Baier of Texas, and Mac O’Jima of Japan.

Before the dance I was curious to see how well the two groups would be able to dance together. I knew that when Modern Western Square Dancing is done in other countries (and it’s done in quite a number of them!) it’s always called in English, so in theory the two groups should be able to dance together, but one can never be certain.

It turned out that everything worked just fine. The Japanese dancers had no problem following calls from the American callers, and Mr. O’Jima’s English was exceptionally good. He had a little L/R blur in his accent (to be expected since Japanese doesn’t have the distinction, just like English doesn’t distinguish between two P sounds that–say–Hindi does), and I noticed he had a little singular/plural issue since Japanese doesn’t inflect words for this either (thus he’d say "Join all your hand and circle to the left" instead of "Join all your hands and circle to the left"), but his English–including his accent–was really, really good. At times, his accent sounded a bit Scottish to me, and I wondered if his English teacher was from Scotland or somewhere in the British commonwealth.

Mr. O’Jima also complimented my pronunciation of Japanese, FWIW.

All three of three of the callers were outstanding. Ken Bower and Bob Baier related a story about when the two of them had visited Japan for a friendship dance over there, and some confusion had arisen over Ken’s name. At one point (if I have this right), someone said "Kon ban wa" to Bob Baier, who misheard and replied, "Ken Bower? Oh, he’s not here right now." (I got a real kick out of that since I’d been saying kon ban wa to people all evening, and the similarity had never occurred to me.)

BTW, here’s a YouTube with Ken Bower (who is a super nice guy) being interviewed about the dance:

So that’s the story of how I got my second square dance dangle/pin/thingie.

(Incidentally, the hearts you see on the vest were temporary stickers from a recent Valentines Day dance around the same time, where there was a "king of hearts" competition in which the lady dancers awarded them to the male dancers of their choice. I got four. The winner got six, if I’m not mistaken.)