文化発表会

Today my base school had their annual bunka happyou kai, or "culture festival," though actually it was all music. I got to sleep in this morning because I live much closer to the event location than to the school, so I met everyone there at 9:45. Each of the 16 homerooms performed a song, with one of the students accompanying on the piano and one of them directing. I was a little surprised that there was a decent piano player in each homeroom.  I wonder if they have to take that into consideration at the beginning of the school year when they are assigning classes. Anyway, all the songs were in Japanese, and I didn't recognize any of them except for one group singing that really pretty theme song from Spirited Away. A couple of the groups sounded pretty good, though several of them had one or two boys standing off on the end with their uniforms unbuttoned, head cocked, arms crossed, sucking their teeth in obvious displeasure at having to do anything that wasn't their own idea. Same thing they do during class, bleh.. (I think that's one of them on the far right in this picture above.) My supervisor seemed to imply that last year's bunkasai was practically ruined by bad attitudes, but that it was much better this year. And it wasn't so bad, just a little distracting. At any rate, after all the singing was done, the wind band performed a few songs, mostly stage band tunes like "Tequila" and some 70's rock song I forgot the name of. Except for the first tune, a student was allowed to direct them, and there were a number of good soloists.  The odd thing for me was that the band had about 40 girls and only 4 boys. (I suppose that is a result of the system of only letting the kids be in one club. If they are in band, they can't do any sports, so I guess a lot of the boys choose sports.) After the band played, two of the teachers gave a kind of silly rock guitar performance, complete with light show, a pile of stompboxes, and some noodle-rific guitar licks.  They really played it up as if they were rock stars, striking poses and headbanging, to the absolute delight of all the students. Really hilarious. Then they had a short awards ceremony to announce the winners of the singing competition, and I was home by 2:45.
These photos are unclickable
for the previously mentioned reasons.