Bunkasai - The Cultural Festival!

What Exactly IS a Cultural Festival?
It’s sort of hard to explain what a Cultural Festival is because we don’t have them in America. I guess the easiest way to describe it is as a school festival, where each class (group of 40 students that have every subject together) presents a project or performance to the school. Sort of like an International Bazaar (with a focus on Japan) or a school-wide talent show. I haven’t seen High School Musical, but it might be something like that. Anyways, from my previous posts, I trust you have gathered that this event is considered a pretty big deal, is a common practice at all Japanese (high) schools and that there is a lot of preparation put into it. Most classes do dances and it seems that the most popular ideas, like Thriller or the Japanese UFO dance, are recycled over and over. There are also other classes (at my school, all the first-years, for example) that decorate classrooms or do other large art projects to display. One class made a Balloon Funhouse (a huge classroom literally filled with balloons, both taped to the walls & ceilings and floating, as well as handing out balloon animals), another class used ½ inch squares of paper to make a mosaic of their whole class (that hung outside and took up the entire side of our school), while others made a giant Statue of Liberty and even a Haunted House (yup, they made me scream once). Pretty cool! Not every club presents something, but the cooking club sold cookies and my English Club hosted a Prom (taking prom pictures). At most school, there are stands selling food (my friend Tam sold Tacos with her ESS girls), but we didn’t have it at our school. Then again, our Bunkasai was on a Friday, rather than the weekend, so we had fewer family visitors than other schools may entertain. In addition to holding the event on the weekend, I have also gathered that many high schools use two full days (so maybe a Friday and a Saturday) for their Cultural Festivals, not including the preceding day without classes used for set-up. Our school only does one.
Dance, Dance, Revolution
The dances were definitely my favorite part of the day. There was a lot of trance and Japanese hip-hop, with students in costumes, pushing the temporary freedom from the normally strict social rules as far as possible. One second-year class did jump rope tricks, while another class did martial arts. The class I work with the most (2の１) did an act from some famous soap opera, called Girlfriend, in addition to some of the girls dancing. I thought it was going to be to be a dance to the new Avril Lavigne song (since I know a couple of the boys really like her music), but I pretty much didn’t understand what was going on the whole time once I did realize it was a play. Guess you have to watch TV, um, and in Japan, to catch the references.
Lunch and Prom
After watching performances in the gym all morning, we had a two-hour lunch break. The staff all got really nice bento (box) lunches and students took a break to eat the food they had brought from home, while everyone walked around to see the decorated classrooms (like the haunted house). A coworker gave me a free ticket to the tea ceremony club’s fundraiser, where Nozaki Sensei and I enjoyed a traditional cup of matcha, served by the tea club members in their yukatas (summer kimonos). I made a quick run through all the first –year exhibits (including the Statue of Liberty and giant, lit up globe that they made), but I spent most of the hour in my classroom, hosting Prom with ESS. We made a few large posters explaining what prom is and had sample prom pictures hung up on the walls, but I would say 99% of our visitors didn’t know about the tradition or concept before visiting our room.
After the lunch break, we all filtered back into the gym (the floors were covered so we didn’t need to switch to gym shoes) to watch the rest of the performances. There was one really impressive dance by a class of third-year boys, but otherwise, the rest of the third-years just observed, rather than participating or presenting anything. I guess our staff didn’t want them spending time and energy on organizing something when the opportunity cost is studying for the upcoming entrance exams. After a few more classes did their dances, the band played and there was a closing ceremony, which I missed because I left early to get to Tokyo. I can imagine it was a lot like the opening ceremony, however with a lot of dramatic music and a speech by the principal and maybe student council.

Overall, I think my expectations were exceeded... I am already brainstorming ideas for what ESS can do next year!

For more general (but limited) information, here’s the Wiki-page on Bunkasai: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Cultural_Festival