BUNKASAI - School Cultural Festival.

This is a BIG deal here. Kids spend pretty much a whole year preparing for this and the last few weeks have been intensive practices after school for the various "acts". Among these are performances by the chorus club (choir), computer club (anime video and sports club highlight reel), drama club (do a play), and my personal favourite, the brass band. Sincerely, the junior high brass bands here are unbelievable. In fact most kids at most activities are unbelievable good because they do it every day, all year. Unlike in Canada where kids can do mulitiple activities at a time and cycle through 2 or 3 sports in a school year, here in Japan, kids pick ONE thing and they do it to death. So the end product are 12-14 year olds who are really good at what they do.


Here is the Kudamatsu brass band performing. Quite an experience. First of all, as I think I've mentioned, the band is really good. I'm talking full band here, including a complete percussion section with gong, timpani, xylophone, MARIMBA for cryin' out loud. Secondly, the 1.5 hour performance included dramatized skits (acted by some teachers, which the kids went NUTS over...the girls were screaming like it was Ricky whatsisname who sang those songs) in between movements so that the whole thing was like a soundtrack kind of. And to complete my day, if not my life, they played a DEEP PURPLE medley at the end, including "Smoke On the Water", which rocked.


This is the handicapped kids class at Suetake performing with their bells. I love these kids; left to right Sota, Yuya, and Yuka (with an eyepatch over her fake eye so it wouldn't fall out during the performance, I was told later by their teacher). And I like to think they love me too. They performed this for me at the end of class I had with them one time and it was soooo cute...and actually, very difficult, if anyone has every done bells. Yuya in the middle loves music and really got into it; a few times for emphasis he would raise his hands above his head and throw his head right back like this was the best thing in the world. Everyone in the gym (all 700 students, plus parents) was clapping to their song and at the end, a big chant of "encore encore!"

* just an aside about encore, because I heard it a lot this weekend. It sounds, to the western ear, like they are all chanting "Un-cle Ray! Un-cle Ray!" and you may wonder, "who is Uncle Ray, and why is he so popular? And how can he be at three different schools at the same time?". In fact, they are just pronouncing the word 'encore' phonetically, as it would be read in Japanese. En-co-re.


Here are some Suetake 7th graders practicing. Each class performed a song and at the end, the best class out of each grade were given prizes. Each class had an accompanist and a conductor. The conductors were so amazing and cute. They would walk out onto stage. Stop. Face the audience. Bow. Face the choir. Raise his/her hand (choir would then assume the relaxed position, legs slightly more apart from the 'attention' stance). Count off one bar at which point the pianist would start. Then conductor would conduct another bar with BOTH arms, and THEN the choir would start.


This is a massive mosaic-type mural made of thousands of little coloured squares of paper. This is Kubo's mural, depicting this year's national high-school baseball hero, Saitou (of WASEDA, who led his team to victory by pitching 22 innings in the final two days) and Tanaka (who pitched just as hard for the losing team). These guys are honestly nation-wide celebrities now.