Culture Festival

Today we finally had our Culture Festival at TJHS. It feels like we've been preparing for it for quite some time now. All in all, I would say it was a great success.

The first portion of the festival involved five students giving speeches on various topics. I think it was structured as a speech contest, actually. I couldn't understand very much of the speeches, but I thought the students delivered them very well.

The next section of the festival was a series of music, dance and theater performances. The school band (which is to say, all of the students and teachers) performed a famous song from the Ghibli movie Princess Mononoke. It was very beautiful. The PTA sang two songs, which I got to join in on. I had practiced pretty hard, but one of the two songs was just too fast for me to get all of the lyrics. Still, I enjoyed it a lot.

Next I was in a play with the 1st graders; it was The Three Little Pigs. The narration was mostly in Japanese, but our lines were in English. I thought that was pretty cool. They also used a projector and a screen to show images from a storybook while we were acting it out. We didn't really have any props, so I think that was a very good idea. The teacher had asked me to come up with the moral of the story, and since I couldn't remember what it was, I gave her "Anything worth doing is worth doing well." I meant it in terms of the smart pig being the one who built his house out of bricks, but since she delivered the moral right after the wolf got boiled in the pot, I'm not sure it made a lot of sense. Still, we all had fun. I had to wear a surgical mask with a pig nose taped onto it, as well as pig ears and a giant muumuu-like pink costume. It was hilarious to watch Yudai as the wolf, since he really didn't give a damn about the whole thing. He was not very menacing, as you might guess.

After that, the third graders did a musical performance on xylophones, marimbas, and keyboards. Then we watched a movie made by the second graders. It was about a softball team at a very small school, and how two of the boys were lazy and quit the team, but later repented and joined back up with more enthusiasm than ever. It was pretty funny, though I couldn't tell whether that was intentional or not. Next the third graders put on a play/dance that I honestly could not make sense of. The dancing was pretty awesome, though, and made me feel rather insecure about the Gaga dance, which was coming up later.

I have to admit, the longer we've spent practicing the Gaga dance, the less confident I've felt about it. I thought it was a one-shot class and that it would never be performed, so I oversimplified it. Then the English teacher also turned it into something else by having us hold shiny pom poms while we danced. In the original dance, we're acting like monsters. Our hands are claws, and sometimes we go slinking around the stage. But when you add pom poms we just end up looking like cheerleaders with very bad posture. It was surreal in a ridiculous way. So by the time we performed the dance, I had some doubts about it. However, at this point I had convinced myself that I just needed to take it less seriously and go all-out with the performance.

Jumping back into the actual timeline of events, the next performance was the teachers' choir. I also got to sing with them, and this was my favorite of the three songs I learned. I think we sounded better than we had in practice, and it seemed like the students were impressed. They were paying close attention, at the very least. They seemed surprised to see me sing in Japanese. I really enjoyed singing, but at this point I was also very nervous for the dancing, which was up next. As soon as we finished singing, I had to bolt out of the gym so I could change into my dance costume in the computer room. I had about four outfits to wear today; one for the Three Little Pigs, another for choir, one for the Gaga dance, and one for my solo. It felt like I was back in the Genki musical again... actually, I only had two costumes to wear in the musical. Wow.

Anyhow, up next were the third graders and I. We were all set to go, with our black clothes, shiny pink or blue sashes, and silver and gold pom poms. I wasn't so nervous about performing this dance, but I was trying to convince myself there was absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about. My attempts became that much more difficult when I saw some of last year's third graders (now high school students) imitating us at the back of the gym as we danced. Oh well. I gave it my all, and I honestly could not tell you what anyone else looked like. I'm guessing the third graders were great, though.

As soon as that dance ended, I ran back into the little room off-stage to trade skirts. For my solo I had decided to wear a shiny navy blue skirt with my black shirt and tights from the Gaga dance. It's a pretty awesome skirt; it has a lot of sequins on it, and it swishes when you move. Okay, focus, Andrea. Enough about the costume. I was pretty keyed up since I was going to be dancing this one alone in front of all my students, their parents, a number of my elementary students, and some representatives from the Board of Education. And it's kind of a silly dance, as well. It also looks a little strange to have a single person dancing something that was choreographed for a group of nine girls, but you use what you've got. Which was just me. So I took my position at the middle of the stage, they opened the curtains and the music started. I gave it as much cuteness and cheerfulness as I could manage, and the audience clapped along with the music part of the time. I only made one or two small mistakes, which I'm pretty sure weren't noticeable from the audience. It was kind of odd looking out into the rows of chairs and seeing the red light of T-sensei's camcorder as he recorded everything. I had noticed it during the Gaga dance, but it feels a lot different when you know you're the only thing that camera is focused on. I'm pretty sure S-sensei was taking pictures as well; he had been taking pictures of everything else. I made it to the end of the song, and that was that. I was done performing for the day.

After the dancing there were still a few closing speeches to be made, but the program was essentially over. I was a little surprised to be the closing act. Once the final speeches had been made, all that was left was the bazaar and lunch. The bazaar was basically a yard sale held in the back of the gym. Like last year, the English teacher very strongly encouraged me to go find something to buy. This year I got a compact mirror that looks like a chicken's face on the outside. It's really cute, and only cost 50 yen. Along with the random household goods, they were also selling fresh ginger and some vegetables. I passed on all of that since I don't really cook.

In front of the school, the PTA was selling lunch. There was yakisoba, udon, and curry with rice. I went straight for the curry. It was pretty dang good. I sat next to Yuki, who is the small, occasionally troublesome but clever and friendly boy from my second grade class. We talked a tiny bit while we ate. Of all the students, he makes the most attempts to communicate with me. Then I went back into the staff room and waited until it was time to start taking things down. That time came soon enough. There was quite a bit to do, but it went quickly. I helped whenever I could figure out what needed to be done and how to do it. No one was really giving me instructions, so I probably didn't do as much work as I was really capable of, but at some point I'm just in the way when I try to help.

At this point, I was starting to realize that there would not be any time to go home before the enkai at 5:00. I had previously thought that I would get to go home for a little while; the English teacher had said something about giving me a ride from my house. It turned out that she had meant that she would give me a ride home AFTER the enkai. I had gone to bed late the previous night and gotten up at 6:20 am, so I was pretty wiped out. I even went so far as to lay my head on my desk for a little while when there was no work left to do. So we passed the time until we could go to the enkai.

It turned out that the party was being held in a little building basically across the street from the school. It was a very inexpensive enkai since it wasn't being held at a restaurant. There was some sushi, fried foods, and snacks as well as a variety of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. A lot of the teachers weren't drinking since they had to drive themselves home, but the ones who did drink probably drank enough for everyone. The PTA were also at this enkai. At first I was a little uncertain how I felt about that, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. Some of the parents introduced themselves to me and I got a chance to attempt to tell them how great their kids are. Since I had to do it in Japanese, I'm not so sure I got it right, but I think they understood what I was getting at.

One of the more entertaining parts of the night was talking with T-sensei and S-sensei about dancing. They had both praised me excessively for my solo dance and said that they wanted me to teach them a dance like that for next year's Culture Festival. T-sensei, who is in his forties and likes to tease me, was most likely just joking. But S-sensei, who seems to be about my age, appeared very enthusiastic about it. This also might've been because he was very drunk. But he talked with me for quite a while, which is a first, and I enjoyed it. We spoke mostly in Japanese but when I just couldn't find the words for something, if I said it clearly in English he usually understood. I think his English is a lot better than I realize. Prior to this neither of us had really attempted to talk to the other, so I guess he didn't have any way of knowing how much Japanese I would understand, and I didn't think that he would know so much English. I'm hoping that now we'll talk to each other more, but the drunken friendliness you encounter at an enkai doesn't usually carry over into the staff room. Still, who knows.

Eventually it was time to call it a night. This enkai started at 5:00 so it didn't go all that late, thank God. The English teacher was so kind as to give me a ride home. I still had a taxi ticket I could've used, but then I would've had to wait for a taxi. And I can't imagine the Board of Education will complain about me saving them thirty five bucks. So now I'm home, and very tired. The people at TJHS get the next two days off since they worked yesterday and today, but I don't get my compensatory holiday until Thursday, so tomorrow I'll just have to suck it up and go to school. That being the case, it is time for me to go to bed.