Real Life? HAHA I REMEMBER THAT.

[fenlings]

We had the Bunkasai at Nishi a few days ago. It's my first week there (finally!), and I think I like it the best out of all the schools. It's the smallest, and there is such a relaxed atmosphere and team spirit. Everyone tries to talk to me, and seems interested in learning/teaching. But walking to and from the train station, it's like reeeeally inaka, and there are the GIANT HUGE FREAKING ENORMOUS spiders and spiderwebs that like span the street. I just keep my head down and keep walking.

The Bunkasai (Cultural Festival) basically had two parts: a talent show part and a classroom exhibit part.

The talent show part was in the gym stage and took practically the whole day. The show started with a student playing Hard Gay! After the vice-principal had made such a well-mannered introduction speech (and I gave a quick self-intro), it was quite a shock to see him a few minutes afterwards up there alone on stage thrusting his hips and shouting "HOOOOOO!" He had on a shiny silver version of the outfit in that article, and apparently he bought it on internet auction for like 8000 yen. I think his teacher helped him pay for it. Now he's going to put it up for auction at a higher price. Hee. All the kumi did a play, and then some of the sentaku and clubs and I don't know what all did some stuff too.

The kumi plays were very strange. There were two Taro plays. The first was Kanitaro (crab taro). With the giant cardboard crab and other random fighting animals, it was totally cracktastic and pretty incomprehensible to me. In the second, Urameshitaro, Taro transformed into "old" by putting on a Santa hat and beard. It was even *more* cracktastic. Then he and his gang were shot by distrustful girl soldiers in school uniform (from the future?), despite the Matrix limbo Taro performed. Ah firing squads. Good times. There was one normal play about Koreans and Japanese during WWII and its aftermath, but it was kinda boring. It did have a really lovely traditional Korean fan dance by the girls, though. Most of the time, none of the students would cheat out on stage, and the mikes were unreliable, so I couldn't really hear that well, much less understand what they were saying. The best kumi play was a frame story where the teacher and some of his students were watching TV in his apt. So there were many TV parodies. Very funny, even if I didn't get half the references. Boy is the one who watches Japanese TV, not me! In the final TV show, the teacher dressed up in a shiny blue yukata and samurai hairpiece, and danced and sang like a TV personality with his class as backup. It was hilarious.

The rest of the show was mostly dancing. A lot of dancing. And the Japanese make *everything* into a dance mix. I heard "The Tiki Room," the "Winnie the Pooh" theme, "You Can Fly," and a Japanese "Hey Miki." Some of the dancing was good--choreography actually making an effort to follow the music. There was a lot of dancing in cheerleader uniforms with shiny gold pompoms, but no actual cheerleaderish stuff, thank god. There was a lot of baton twirling too, with varying degrees of success. The baton twirlers needed to pick up their freaking batons right away when they dropped because air baton, just like air flag or air rifle, looks retarded. It was totally distracting. /ex-flag captain spiel> At one point in their medley, the baton twirlers were dancing to this song "Be A Man!" I swear. At the lyrics: "Be a man! With all the strength of a rolling river! Be a man! Mysterious as the dark side of the mooooon!" I cracked the fuck up in my chair. These were little girls dancing with batons in leotards and dance skirts. I can hardly think of a song less appropriate. The girls were dancing with pulled up black socks and ballet slippers. It looked good, but really--ballet slippers and socks? Only in Japan.

Some classrooms had displays in them and people could wander between the stage show and the classrooms. There was one which had different cultural artifacts from around the world--the teacher had connections at museums. Then there was one where the students made doll-sized schools and other buildings with cardboard, and made twisty little people to go inside them out of that ::waves hand:: twisty stuff like playdough but it dries like hard foam. Weird psychadelic little worlds, where everyone looked like a Dali painting. There was one with a bunch of monsters and monster heads. Very cute.

The finale onstage was the brass band performance. To my ears they sounded fantastic! I couldn't believe this was a middle-school band. For fun songs, they played "Maiahi" (aka "Dragostea Din Tei"). How freaking hilarious is that? God, that song has permeated all aspects of Japanese culture. I think I want to start a punk rebellion now. Okok, I kinda sang along. It's catchy! Then they played "Tequila" too, and I remembered our guard dance to that song during pep band at football games. Ah, the memories. But two songs in a row about drinking alcohol at a middle-school festival--go Japan! To close up the show, Hard Gay came out again, thrusted and "HOOO!"ed a few times, and then just sat down in his chair on stage to be the voiceover for the closing powerpoint presentation. The abrupt change in demeanor made everyone laugh.

Some of the first years say that they did colorguard in PE class in elementary school. YAY.