Showing Guernseys to Japan

Myself, my partner, and our friends, all wearing our Guernseys for NHK's documentary

Yesterday was a rather unique day - a visiting group of Japanese filmmakers from the TV network NHK visited Guernsey as part of a documentary they are filming on knitting!

You can read more about the event here at the Guernsey Press website:

https://guernseypress.com/news/2025/01/27/guernsey-wearers-itching-to-appear-in-japanese-documentary/

Guernsey has quite a history of knitwear, with the eponymous jumper, itself called a Guernsey, being quite well known worldwide. Japan is apparently the largest buyer of our knitwear, attracting the creators to the island, who put out an advert for folks to come along and wear their Guernsey's for the production outside of Town church. Despite the admittedly poor weather, around 200 of us showed up, which I think rather surprised the crew who seemingly expected only a handful - we had to change location to the market steps to fit everyone in! In honesty I suspect that, had the weather been better, the turnout would have been substantially greater than that - any excuse to share a little bit of local pride brings out throngs of Guerns - provided the weather isn't too bad. I don't personally have a Guernsey as I am vegan and they have sadly stopped making the cotton ones at both Guernsey Woolens and at Le Tricoteur (though I bought one for my partner Ty during the last run of the cotton ones at Guernsey woolens - had I known I would have bought one for me too!), so I borrowed a unique one with a Guernsey flag print on the chest from my good friend Terry Tibbs, a used car salesman and fan of local knitwear - I hope I did you proud my friend! I managed to convince a few good friends along as well who all came in a nice variety of colours and styles of Guernsey, really representing the variety of our cosy island style. As we all gathered on the market steps, someone shouted "Lets all sing them Sarnia Cherie!" of which we all knew about 1/3 of the lyrics, but we certainly gave it our all, belting out the parts we knew and awkwardly humming along with the parts that we didn't. Hopefully a good showing of local pride. Also, usefully enough, I had been practicing Japanese for a whopping 5 days, so I got a nice opportunity to practice the tiny amount I know ("I don't know very much Japanese - still a long way to go), which the folks from NHK were incredibly polite about The documentary is due to be released at some point in March - very much looking forward to seeing Guernsey, both the island and the jumper, represented for one of it's nicest traditions. To the documentary presenter and to the production crew, I've had to use google translate this time, though hopefully in future I'll be able to write it myself:

私たちの島にお越しいただきありがとうございます。楽しいひとときをお過ごしいただけたと思います。