Bunkasai - The school festival

This last week was the week of the school festival - or bunkasai. This means alot of things but for us it meant a week with no teaching, expensive food and working a national holiday. Although describing it like that makes it sound worse than it was, mostly because it was ace. The festival itself was on the monday and tuesday and essentially every class turn their classroom into something to raise money for the school - so things like restaurants, cafes, haunted houses, crossdressing maid cafes, that sort of thing. Hold up, crossdressing maid cafes what the... The girls in the school are told they arent allowed to host a maid cafe so the lads in one class dressed up like women and held their own maid cafe, it was... how do I put this... disturbing. Infact the reaction of one girl pretty much sums it up - she walked into the cafe and about 10 seconds later ran out of the exit looking horrified shouting the equivalent of "AHHH GROSS".

Other than that though it was all amazing, the haunted house was done really well, the food was quality (still a complete rip off though) and the ice cream/crepe cafes were class. I spent so much money over the two days on food it was unreal. Aswell as the classes being transformed, several clubs did performances - the orchestra was amazing, if youd heard the music you would never have guessed they were high school students, the shorinji kempo shows were great (and Im joining their club on monday so more posts about it to come fo sho), there were also dancers, cheerleaders, baton twirlers, bands, and a play by the foreign language society.

On the thursday after the festival was over and cleaned up, the entire school went across to Hokutopia, this massive theatre, for some speeches and for afew of the shows from the bunkasai to be performed again. This was possibly the first time Ive done a speech to over 1,000 people never mind a speech in Japanese, but alas I did it, I didnt slip up, and no one laughed so Id say that was a success. It also means that I dont think Ill ever be nervous infront of a class of 30 kids anymore, because I know true fear. After falling asleep during a 2 hour maths speech (all in Japanese), it was time for the shows - some were amazing like the orchestra, the shorinji kempo and the choirs but afew misshaps also happened. The foreign language society performed the wizard of oz and dorothy tripped over the yellow brick road, the mics stopped working at times and the curtain was pulled too early. Still a good show, but I felt so bad watching so many problems going on after the amazing shows they put on on the smaller stage at bunkasai.

I'll make this the last post for today (I've already posted 3 stupidly long ones) and hopefully Ill try to update this regularly instead of having to make so many posts at once to catch up. No promises.

Mike Burns