I had the dubious honor of being the unofficial English-speaking wrangler of several aggressive Japanese fans at the Olympic sendoff dinner, and ended up clarifying quite a few “lost in translation” moments for Nathan, Nathan’s family, and Adam.
I’m going to split up my observations into parts because the event was about 2 hours long, so sorry for the length and I’ll be posting the parts as I get them written up.
Part 1: Nathan’s family
Nathan’s 21 year old brother: Is in school, is studying Aerospace Engineering. Says [he and Nathan] don’t do anything to get their hairy curly, it just does that. Wears hip chunky black glasses. He looks nearly exactly the same as Nathan, perhaps even a touch younger. Laughed when he was asked about hockey, admits he eats McDonalds. He has never been to Korea, so it will be exciting.
Two sisters were there (I didn’t catch which of the siblings were which because I was being polite and the bolder just charged ahead, ahh!): They don’t have to do these kinds of events very often, very proud, etc. They knew he was something special, so this [the shindig, notoriety etc] is not that surprising. Aside: they are very pretty and I’m totally jealous of this family’s genes.
I asked about the paper Nathan linked in his twitter, but didn’t pursue it further because I asked the wrong sister, doh.
Mom: As stated before, she told us to ask him whatever we want, assuming we can find him. She seemed very laid back about his whereabouts or what he does, which makes sense to me since his agent is on top of it and obviously he’s not a kid anymore. It looked like Mom was more the contact with the USFSA, and the other family members were not approached all that much by fans/press. The girls seemed a little bewildered when they were asked for selfies too.
Dad: I missed all the eavesdropping here. Also laid back.
At this point, none of the athletes had even arrived and Nathan’s agent was looking put upon by the Japanese fans.
Dear USFSA: The Japanese fans were very blunt that this was a very inexpensive opportunity to meet great skaters and that $100 was really not all that much considering how much the JSF charges for everything and they don’t even have these kinds of meet-and-greets at all. I think the USFSA could have milked a bit more money out of the event, since they had higher demand than supply of the tickets (i.e. space).
End Part 1: Family
:
I wonder why he didn't do it in the long program. :scratch:
), and the athletes were pulled for some official photos with the Gold Level USFSA sponsors.
There were at least 10 fans in the very first moment he was free. Poor guy crawled at about 1 foot every 5 minutes trying to get to his family at the back of the room. Other athletes started getting a queue, but the foreign fans had no such compunction, and I could observe how his agent would interrupt a fangirl moment to introduce various reporters. 
