See the World

It's culture festival time ladies and gentlemen so strap on your bonnets, tip your top hats and sit down for the wild ride ahead. The term 'culture festival', for me at least, arouses such images as aboriginals doing their thing, stalls of food etc. A culture festival in a school probably has like a crepe stand, or someone singing a song in French or something. Generally it's all something we've seen before but at the very least it puts a welcome blip on our daily life seismograph.

So what does a Japanese cultural festival entail? Well. It's not so much 'culture' as it is essentially a day-long performing arts night. About a week and a half ago I went to school on a Saturday for my smaller schools' culture festival (Ogawa). It had been coming up for quite a while and I guess there was what you could call 'hype' about it. One of my students for the speech contest was a member of the student council so she was practicing for 4 performances on top of the speech contest (possibly why she came 4th...) and she would sometimes tell me the goings on.

(class 3-1 singing)

It all began at 8:45am with the choral competition where each class sang a song and all the teachers judged them. After this ordeal it was the PTA's turn to sing. I was invited to join the PTA choir and I was sort of keen to sing a song in Japanese so this was a lot of fun for me! We had practiced a few times and we were sounding good! We sang our songs very well and the students liked that I was singing in Japanese so that was probably my highlight for the day.

(Student Council Taiko performance)

After a break the day became interesting. All the windows were covered up and it sort of became like a talent show minus judging. It began with this awesome, fantastic taiko performance which was really, really cool. From then on, however, it was plagued with poor organisation, microphone issues and a nasty case of quantity over quality. I feel obliged at this stage to point out that when it comes to events like these I compare it to performing arts nights at my highschool. Everything was well planned, the performances were top-notch and it was generally pretty impressive. Of course it's not fair to compare the two as performing arts is a bigger deal in schools in Australia than it is in Japan...

But to the student's credit some of the bands were pretty cool. The microphones weren't working properly so it was impossible to hear the singer most of the time but they did look pretty cool up on stage. All the students watching would rush up to the front and mosh every time a band came on. The dances and singing all looked like they were conceived the night before and yet I know that can't be the case as all the 3rd years had special t-shirts signifying the occasion. One redeeming act was the whole school choir who sang this amazing song with awesome harmonies and everything.



The 3rd year students also sang a song in English! "We are the World" is one of those charity songs that never goes very far but holds a decent melody. The 3rd year English teacher had been making the students sing it in English class and so I think the tone was slightly mocking but they tried their hardest with each member singing a sentence each. They didn't have to perform it on stage like that - they chose to! Which I'm going to take as a good thing.

Next cultural festival was at Bato. This festival also began with a choral competition only this time I had heard most of the songs from my prior cultural festival (I was an expert at this stage) which made things, like, massively interesting for me.......
I offered to join the PTA choir at this school but it I couldn't go to any rehearsal so I was surprised to find out (on stage) that they had a skit and dance moves involved with the first song. I should have known that something like this would happen and it was su-per embarrassing to be standing there on stage watching everyone do things that I didn't know about in front of the whole school. The second song was kinder to my soul (*sigh*) and involved simple standing and singing...

(The 1st years contribution. Flipping cards that spelled various things I couldn't understand)

After this experience, instead of having bands and so on perform, each class had to put on a skit. Some were interesting and funny. Some were awful. It was a bit of a mixed bag really but again - it was fun to see my students up on stage doing something fun like that so I didn't mind sitting there all day again.

(Some art from the students at Bato)

After both of the cultural festivals there was a drinking party with the teachers. These parties usually cost something like 4000yen (which is like what, $47? I don't know exactly) and are supposed to include all I can drink but as I live about half an hour away by car, I have to drive. Which makes these nights an expensive endeavour indeed! I do like spending time with the teachers in an informal setting though and everyone is more inclined to speak English to me when they've been drinking which is nice.

In both cases it was an interesting experience to observe. I'm sure the students had a good time too and that's the goal really so mission accomplished!

P.S. Couldn't really be bothered dealing with formatting issues so it's pretty much picture, writing, picture, writing...... as you probably know at this stage.

P.P.S. I read some of Averil Byrne's emails and boy she has a poetic way of putting things. I'm sorry my best writing is of cynicism and sarcasm. It's what I do best. Apparently.

P.P.P.S. Halloween was last weekend! I went to a halloween party on the Sunday. I was a pirate.

kris.