To signal the end of summer vacation and the start of the final trimester in Japanese schools, each high school holds their festival to showcase student talents, creativity, and culinary skill. Ours was a two-day affair, kicking off Thursday morning with an assembly. The school band took the stage and struck up a few tunes, playing at a calibre I would assign to a college group. Being a former band geek myself, I couldn't help but marvel at their instrumentation. In addition to hum-drum flutes, clarinets, trumpets, and tubas, their lineup boasted six french horns, two upright basses, a few oboes, bassoons, and a full percussion section including chimes, bells, timpani, drum set, and auxiliary.
The room itself was not unlike the American gymnasiums I'm familiar with. Tarps covered the hardwood floor of the basketball/volleyball courts, with hundreds of chairs set up for the student body. The heat, as usual, hovered over us all in a menacing and quite annoying manner. Hands worked relentlessly with paddle fans to keep faces cool, but won only small victories. My own fan waved furiously in front of my body, staving off the suffocating humidity of the Japanese summer.
"You've never seen so much black hair," Bryan commented as the band packed up and the school principal took to the microphone to officially begin the day's activities. I had to agree.
After the principal had his say, students hopped on the stage to advertise their various projects. Japanese students are divided into homerooms, and each homeroom had prepared something for the festival. First-year students (the equivalent of 10th grade in the US) had various dances and routines to be seen on Friday morning's assembly. Second years (11th graders) were in charge of the food tents, which ranged from fried chicken to waffles-n-ice-cream and yaki soba, fried noodles. Third years (12th graders) had transformed their home classrooms into various attractions. Among the most impressive were:
-The roller coaster room, in which the students had stacked desks, laid plywood down as tracks, built a few cars out of wood and swivel wheels, and then pushed other students around the track, up to the top of the desks, and then off a large incline and into a big picture of the english teacher of their choice, finally arresting the runaway cart with a huge pile of blankets and cushions.
-The "ghost house" (or haunted house) in which students built a maze of horrors for other students to walk through, complete with mask-wearing psychos, blood splatters, sound effects, and various bloody body parts as decoration. This wasn't your mother's haunted house - it was legitimately horrifying.
I kept coming back to the fact that none of this -- students hovering over hot grills, blood-and-gore, or roller coasters which ended in concrete walls covered in cushions -- would be allowed in the US. "They're not as sue-happy here," Bryan explained simply. Apparently Suki's mom wouldn't come after someone's head if her daughter got a bloody nose from running too fast through a house of horrors constructed by her peers. Oh, and side note: there's no law here requiring orange "caps" on fake guns, and there's also no rule against bringing fake guns to school, meaning I saw several students running down the halls brandishing completely real-looking pistols. Or maybe they were real... I couldn't tell, and no one seemed to care.
The food was delicious. Bryan and I meandered around for about an hour, trying various dishes. I even indulged in a traditional Japanese festival food, the english translation of which means literally "octopus balls." But don't worry - it's just one of those unfortunate translations. The dish itself is made by taking a bit of octopus and cooking it into a ball of dough along with various seasonings, then garnishing it with barbecue sauce and mayonnaise. When you come to visit, I'll make sure you try some.
Friday afternoon saw student groups taking the large outdoor stage -- erected in the middle of the courtyard -- to dazzle their peers with their karaoke abilities or fun little games which required crowd participation. The headlining act was a group of high school students who had formed a rock band and who pumped up the audience with various US and Japanese hits.
A closing assembly on Friday evening signaled the end of it all, and the students began cleaning up the massive havoc they'd wreaked on the school over the past two days. I helped haul a fews desks to their rightful places in the upper stories of the school, then headed home to begin my weekend.
I had my first enkai, or work party, that night. The English department welcomed me into the school by taking me out to an Italian restaurant in downtown Kanazawa, although it was like no Italian restaurant I had ever seen. The dishes included octopus and grapefruit salad, fresh raw oyster, raw salted pork, garlic bread, crab linguini, and fresh raw shrimp with avocado. Oh, and it was all-you-can-drink for the first two hours. The Japanese love their drinking. We finished off the night with espresso and coffee, welcome speeches from various teachers, a self-introduction by yours truly, a few tips from the other two ALTs at my school, and finally a closing speech.
Classes start Monday. It's been an interesting few weeks getting set up and settled in, but the real fun is about to begin.
Thanks for reading!
-Daniel
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