Today was Culture Festival day at my small school, TJHS. My English teacher had given me quite a lot of advance notice about it and asked that I come, so I agreed, though I rather resent getting up early on a Sunday. I left home this morning not knowing what to expect. I've seen a few Culture Festivals in various anime, but never in real life.
I arrived at 8:15 for the staff meeting. After that, the English teacher escorted me to the gym, where the festival was being held. The gym looks a lot like a typical gym at an American school; wood floor, a large enough space for a basketball court, and a stage at the front. In front of the stage, some xylophones and keyboards and such had been arranged in a semicircle facing the audience. Next there were a cluster of chairs for the students, and then a few rows of chairs for parents and other guests. The teachers sat in a row along the side. I sat with the teachers. At the back of the gym, several tables had been set up for a mini bazaar later in the afternoon.
Of course, the morning started off with several speeches. There was an opening speech, and then four students gave speeches about various things. I didn't understand much of it, but I heard a few things about PET bottles and cars and recycling, so at least one of the speeches had an environmental theme. During the speeches, I did my best not to look sleepy, but I'm not sure how well I succeeded. I had been up until 1:00 or 2:00 the night before.
After the speeches, there was a ten minute break. A lot of people took this opportunity to wander around the gym and look at the displays. On the walls there were posters and artwork that the students had made. In each English class, my students made a large poster. The third years wrote briefly about the previous year's trip to Okinawa and where they'd like to go next. By this time, monkey Obama had been pasted over with a couple of American flags. The second years wrote about Foods of the World, and the first years made acrostic poems using their names. Unfortunately for the students, "U" is a common letter in Japanese names, and it's rather difficult for first year students to come up with words that start with the letter "U". Mostly they used "umbrella" and "UFO".
I enjoyed the students' paintings; some of them had done landscapes of the school and the area around it, and others had done self-portraits. Even to my eye, a few of the self-portraits were recognizable as the student they represented.
After the break, the students sang a song while also giving a multimedia presentation on the projector. It began with pictures of Okinawa and a song that seemed to be about Okinawa. At various breaks in the song, students would speak a few lines about the images they were showing us. I couldn't understand much of it. Of course, the next song ended up being about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In case we didn't recognize what they were singing about, they showed pictures of the cities as seen from the planes that were about to bomb them, and then pictures of the explosions themselves. Fortunately they spared us pictures of the burn victims. I wasn't expecting the subject of the atomic bombs to come up at Culture Festival, so I felt both surprised and awkward about it. I still don't entirely understand how that fit in with the rest of the day's programming, but I didn't feel like asking the English teacher for an explanation.
After that cheerful song, there was another brief break to set things up. Each class played a song on the instruments at the front of the gym, with varying levels of success. I was pretty impressed with some of their marimba and xylophone skills. Once each class had played a song, it was the PTA's turn to get up and sing. My English teacher gave me the option of getting up in front of everyone and pretending to sing or sitting it out. I was going to choose to sit it out because I thought it would be rather selfish to insert myself into an activity that I couldn't even do. However, the vice principal and another teacher came over and made me go up with the teachers and PTA to sing. They gave me the song booklet (which I mostly couldn't read) and more or less told me to just stand up there and move my mouth. In the end, I actually managed to sing a few words because portions of the song were written in hiragana, which I can read. It was embarrassing but at least I got to stand in the back row, where I was hopefully less obvious.
This was followed by more performances by the students. The first years did a short play which seemed to be about a boy who was taken to a kingdom under the sea after he saved a sea turtle from being kicked by his classmates. The sea turtle was pretty hilarious; it looked to be made of a pillow and some construction paper. The casting was interesting, as well. Rather than having one of the two girls in the class play the princess of the sea kingdom, they gave that role to the smallest boy in the class and made him cross-dress. There was some cross-dressing at the Sports Festival as well, so apparently this is a common theme.
The second years ran sort of a game show with audience involvement. For one portion, they asked questions with choices A or B. The audience was to cast their vote by moving to one side of the room or the other. I didn't fully understand the questions, so I occasionally just picked a side at random. It was a fairly fun activity, though. The game show also featured a segment where audience members put their hands into a mystery box and described what they felt; then the rest of the audience would try to guess what was in the box. The little kids in the audience repeatedly guessed "snake". The objects were such things as a coffee mug, a plush shark, and a pot of konnyaku. Konnyaku is a sort of gelatin-like food substance that comes in a variety of forms. It looked rather wet and slimy, in this case.
The third years did a dance performance to the song "Thriller". One of the students got to be Michael Jackson, and the rest were presumably zombies. The dancing was pretty fun to watch. To some extent it incorporated elements of the actual Thriller dance, and then other parts had been made up by the students.
After the last of the performances, there were closing speeches and certificates were given to a few of the students. Next up: the bazaar and lunch time. The bazaar was comprised of random yard sale type items as well as fresh produce. I was very strongly encouraged to purchase things. The teachers told me about the eggs which were being sold; they were a special kind of egg, though I never got an explanation on why they were special. There were also small bags of vegetables, and some homemade sesame seed cookies. I ended up buying a plush raccoon. I tried to pick the most incongruous item I could find, and decided on the raccoon.
Once we were finished shopping, it was time to go to the PTA Cafe. The parents had spent a great deal of time the previous day making fresh noodles for the udon. That day, they also prepared yakisoba (fried noodles) and Japanese-style curry with rice. In hindsight, I probably should've tried the homemade udon, but I opted to have curry rice as it is one of my favorite dishes. I also ended up buying ice cream (which turned out to be banana flavored) and mochi.
The mochi-making may have been my favorite part of the Culture Festival. A few of the dads and male teachers were pounding the rice into paste, which was then rolled into balls and stuffed with red bean paste by a group of old ladies. The mochi was being made fresh, right on the spot. I bought a package with four balls of mochi in it, and they were pretty tasty. As lunch time began to wind down, the students were also given the opportunity to try pounding the mochi dough. Basically, a big heap of rice that had been cooked to the point of being very soft was dumped into a carved-out tree stump (I'm not kidding). The people used what looked like wooden sledgehammers to pound the mochi into paste. Between strikes, someone would stick their hand in and shape the mochi a bit so that it didn't end up just stuck to the sides of the log. After my students had given it a go, they offered me the chance to try pounding the mochi, so I went for it. The hammer thing was rather heavy, but I think I did a good job of pounding the mochi. I hit it pretty hard for the first few strikes, and I heard someone say, "Kowai!", which more or less means, "Scary!". Maybe my students will know better than to mess with the gaijin now.
Pretty soon it was time for clean-up, and my English teacher invited me to call a taxi. I hung around in the staff room and talked with two of the other teachers until my ride came, and that was the end of the day for me. I was quite tired, though I hadn't done much of anything in particular. In the end, Culture Festival was pretty fun and I got to experience some new things. It would have been interesting to see my other school's Culture Festival as well, since it's a much larger school, but that was on the weekend I went to Osaka.
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