Toyotama Bunkasai '08

Today was Toyotama's culture festival. Since I'm not based at that school, I wasn't required to go, and I therefore wasn't given tomorrow off in exchange. Still, I wanted to see how much more fun it would be when half the students weren't passing out from heat exhaustion. The festival began sometime around 9, but I wanted to call Mom and Dad first, so I didn't get to Toyotama until 10ish.

It's officially gotten cold, at least in the early morning, and the wind is slowly returning. The gym provides a good bit of shelter, but most of the benefit--the sunlight streaming in--was cut off due to the need for stage lighting. I noticed one student in particular was shivering bodily, and seemed downright sickly. Her friends were trying to comfort her, and someone gave her their coat, but she seemed pretty upset.

Most of the festival followed the same pattern as Tsushima High's: there was an opening speech by the principal, followed by performances by the chorus. Toyotama is too small to have an official chorus group, but each homeroom has music class periodically. They all got a chance to sing on stage, though they'd all practiced the same set of songs, so it got kind of old.

The girl I'd seen shivering turned out to be one of the piano accompanists for the chorus. She did fine on the first song, but made a lot of mistakes on the second one. For the third one, she blanked out for most of it, resulting in a chorus unexpectedly singing a cappella. Of course, everything was fine for the audience, but I completely understand how mortified she felt. It'd been anxiety, not the cold, that had her looking so sickly earlier.

Next, a group of students gave speeches. I did much better than last year, but I still couldn't understand enough to summarize any of them. After that, a couple of students performed duets on the trumpet or the guitar, with the music teacher accompanying on the piano.

I didn't have as much time to see the homerooms give their presentations, because the classroom exhibitions were much more interesting than Tsushima High's. The second-years did a hand massage room and a magic show, while the first-years made a haunted house. They did a really good job of it, too: using a whole lot of cardboard and tape, they managed to make the classrooms--half the total wall space of which are windows--pitch black. They piled desks and chairs to make walls and a path, with several students strategically placed to freak out the visitors. I ended up walking through with two elementary schoolers, which I think helped me a lot more than it helped them: I could hear my name being whispered throughout the haunted house, and I'm sure they would've been extra nasty to me had I not had five-year-olds shielding me.

For lunch, the cooking class had prepared a whole lot of curry and rice. (The red things are pickles.)For about two bucks a head, you got a bowl of it and some tea. The cooking teacher refused to let me pay for mine, and I ate with Misa (one of my third-year writing students) and another third-year girl.

After lunch, the stage was turned over to some of the third-years, who have a band. Using guitars, a bass, and a drumset loaned by the music teacher, and amps they borrowed from older brothers and friends, they put on a real show. The audience--all forty of the students who weren't busy manning their respective classroom exhibitions--absolutely loved it, almost as much as the performers in the band did.