Bunkasai!

All Japanese High Schools have an auspicious day marked on their calendar-the School Culture Festival. This is a time to forget about school work, and instead put on the art and craft gloves, turn a classroom into a shop of some sort, and over the course of the festival, sell food, products or a service as a class fundraiser. People from all over come to enjoy the festival, including other school's students, people on their days off, parents of students, etc. For the week before, all the clubs had been practising for hours after school, so there was always brass band music echoing through the halls, dancers going through their routines, and cheerleaders doing their pom pom stuff. A massive hubbub of activity, for me, someone who'd never before experienced a culture fest, it felt almost overwhelming at first, for with everyone practising hard out for this occassion, it meant that joing a club was rather difficult, but I was privileged to visit the English Speaking Society one day and help them out with their presentations for the festival.

Food stalls are immensly popular at School Festivals, so a lottery is drawn weeks before to determine which classes may sell food. My homeroom, 206, was one such class to be given this highly sought after opportunity, and with international cultures the theme, a store selling Nachos (Mexico) and Popcorn (American) was conceived.


Wednesday was a half day of school work, with the afternoon spent kicking off our Mexican and American inspired store, so everyone was assigned a role, be it in design, construction, or logistics, worked like a well oiled machine. I was assigned a design role with Miko and Miya, designing the store name which would eventually be placed outside the store to tempt customers inside. I will not lie, my artistic talents are yet to manifest themselves, so I was a little apprehensive when Miya said 'draw a cute Nacho and then a cute Popcorn character'. Putting pen to paper, I came up with something that eventually turned out into this

I'm rather proud of my efforts here, Nacho-san and Poppukon-san were deemed to be sufficiently cute and graced the front of our store.


Thursday and Friday were spent at school, but solely dedicated to preparing our store. A vast amount of cardboard and coloured paper was cut up, painted, glued, rolled, taped, worn, etc., and by the end of Friday, we had set up our store, tables and chairs restaurant style, complete with tablecloths, two food preparation zones for the nachos and popcorn, a cashier zone, plus an elaborate store front where we would entice customers in to part with their money. Someone had spent some time devising the flavours which we would sell, so as to appeal to a wide array of tastes. There was cheese, chilli, meat sauce and original nachos, plus curry, chilli, cinnamon, butter and salted popcorn. A large number of nacho and popcorn bags had been purchased, and teams of people went about putting them into bowls, adding the flavour, and then labelling the bowl with the name of the flavour.

 With all the preparations finished, Saturday morning came by, and I woke up at 6.30, just like any other school day, donned my special homeroom Culture Fest T-shirt, and made my way to school. I arrived at 8.25, as per normal, and the school was already a-buzz with activity. The festival wouldn't start for another 2 and a half hours, but there were plenty of people doing last minute rehearsals, food prep and construction. Going to our shop, I was slightly early, so waited a while for things to start, and then as more and more people began arriving, we made our way down to the central courtyard where the opening ceremony would occur on the outdoor stage. Every homeroom was to do a little presentation as a part of this ceremony, and for our one, we were going to do a dance to an AKB48 song. (for those of you who don't know, here's a link to another of their 'songs' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGTPZZ-QyQ4 )  For this, all of us guys swapped uniform bottoms with our female classmates, so that we had girls in pants and guys in short skirts, myself included, made for an amusing spectacle. The dance itself was a bit of a flop, but no matter, twas still fun, and I'm sure that all the Japanese girls loved the man flesh on display!

After the dances were over, the festival was declared open, and so some of us went to man the shop, others donned mobile popcorn/nacho salesperson gear and went around selling our product to the masses away from the shop, and others used their free time to go round all the other stores, eat some food, and experience other classes' interpretation of 'culture festival'. There was a 'horror house', named Loom Dawn, where we had to crawl our way through a dark labyrinth of desks covered in carboard and paper, all the while hands and things were thrown at us in the confusion, wasn't especially scary, but I did had a bit of a laugh when one of the 'scarers', who had put a ringing cellphone in my path through a little hole in the wall, recieved a little fright of her own. I passed the phone, and turned around in the tunnel, waiting for her hand to come in to retrieve the phone. Shouting 'ROAR' I grabbed her hand, then let go and continued on my way, chuckling at the very loud scream this little shock had produced. As well as that, there were various art displays, theatrical shows, games etc. One of my classmates won a J Pop CD by shooting the smallest target in a game with a rubber band gun, and I won a crap load of candy at a water balloon lifting game.

Later on in the afternoon, it was time to swap shifts, so we were on selling duty, while those who had worked the morning got time to get some food and enjoy the sunshine outside. Seeing as my Japanese wasn't up to taking orders for food, I was assigned mobile salesperson role, and in a group of three we donned trays of food and began selling it outside and in the corridors.

I'm quite proud to say that, despite my Japanese being still rather basic, I was able to sell all of my tray with the claim 'koko de wa sakai no ichiban me oishii tabemono da yo' (here is the world's most delicious food)


As well as the various stores, there was live entertainment going on in the centre courtyard, and in the gymnasium. I was told by my friends Ayaka and Yuri to watch the Cheer (leader) club's performance, and the dance club's one, so I made my way through the throng of people (not hard when most people come up to your shoulder) and watched their impressive performances. Lots of pompoms and ribbons from the cheerleaders,

and lots of hip hop and Hawaiian inspired dance from the dance group. I was also asked by Yuya to go watch his band perform, some very impressive drumming and guitar playing going on, didn't understand the lyrics though. And with that, day one concluded, with the second and final day on Sunday.


The same again happened, waking up at 6.30, donning the homeroom shirt, getting to school, manning the stall, etc. etc. There was more performing by the various groups, plenty of popcorn and nachos being sold, and good fun had by all. Lots of people were interested in who I was, me standing out somewhat as being a gaijin (alien), but also wearing a school shirt, and were very surprised when I spoke Japanese at a level that was comprehendable. As the festival began to run into the final hours, thoughts as to what we'd do afterwards began to sprout. There was a 'party' held in the gymnasium to celebrate everyone's efforts, to give out some awards for best theme, best performance, best shirt, etc. There were a few more band performances, all of whom blurted out (to me) incoherent, impossible to understant noise that barely passed for music, but the rest of the crowd enjoyed it. There were some more dances and cheerleading performances, and lots of screaming Japanese girls. Following this noise fest, Yuya and I made our way with a group of people to the AEON shopping centre for dinner and Pirikura (Japanese Camera booths), where I had delicious aburage tamanegi udon (fried tofu and onion udon noodles) with tempura amai jyagaimo (fried sweet potato), twas very yummy.

15 people crammed into the small Pirukura booth, super cramped but all good fun!


So in short, the Tsurumine High School Culture Festival was very good fun, we sold 27,600 yen worth of popcorn and nachos (approx $NZ 440.00), so a great success! I didn't exactly learn lots of new cultural stuff, but had lots of nice food, won some prizes, had a good time, and got time off school! Today was a half day dedicated to cleaning up the mess we made from the festival, and then Tuesday and Wednesday is school holiday! I think New Zealand High Schools would do well to adopt a similar thing!


That's all from me for now, hope you enjoyed reading it and seeing some of the photos I took, today I gave a speech in assembly, wowed everyone with my slang vocabulary, got several rounds of massive applause, now when I'm in the corridor, people come up to me and say 'Agepoyo!' ( I don't really know what this means, but I used it in my speech and got a lot of laughs and applause for it, so it must be good) In short, I'm now famous at Tsurumine!

Hope all's well with you wherever you happen to be, come back soon to see more of Toroi's adventures under the Kanagawan Sun!