Iiyama 第三中学校 school festival

At most schools in Japan, festivals are part of the calendar and are EXTREMELY important. My school had its festival this weekend, and although I missed the first day, I was able to go to day 2 and see the music festival. I wish I could have gone to the first day because that was the day with the sports festival and all of the students' skits and dances. Some of my third years wanted me to see their dance, but I had a JET conference that was "mandatory." (you can ask me for that story... it's not funny, it's just irritating) I got to see a video with some clips of day 1, and it looked like it was a lot of fun. They did a lot of the usual sports things and then there was also bowling (knocking over water bottles) and some other random things. It rained, however, so the big race where each student has to run like 600m is postponed until Tuesday after school.

The kids do a LOT of preparation for these festivals. Pretty much since I got here in August, they have been doing things after school to prepare, and this past week was insane. Classes were shorter or canceled for decorating and cleaning and setting up the school for parents. Also, the fact that the festival was Friday/Saturday means the whole school has a holiday on Monday! Awesome!

ANYway, I did have a good time watching the music part. The morning started with performances from some elementary school sixth graders. It was interesting to see, because some of the schools had like 8 sixth graders total, while others had two groups of 20 perform. Essentially, the more rural schools are pretty damn small, as in 50 students total. Crazy, ne? I think I get to teach at one of those.. but that is still to come. Back to the festival, after the elementary school performances, each class at my school sang a song, and then each year sang a song. Also, the teachers/PTA sang a song, and I participated! This means that I sang in Japanese in front of a LOT of people. It was a good song, though. Afterwards, the music teacher apologized to me for picking such a hard song! Apparently some of the teachers even were having difficulty singing parts of it, so she figured I must have found it to be impossible. Little did she know that I practiced the song several times at karaoke, so I was actually ok, with the exception of one line. (I love karaoke!)

At the end of the day, there were some awards given out, and then a trophy to the best third year class which resulted in a lot of tears. The winning class was happy they won, so they cried. The losing class was sad they lost, so they cried. All third years were sad that this is their last festival, so they cried. Constant tears for like an hour!

So the main reason for this post: meet my students! I have just under 300 in the school, and I teach all of them. It could be worse, but learning the names is quite a chore! A lot of the kids look very similar! Also, I think there are two sets of twins. Here is a video of the whole school singing a song. If you watch, that is a student conducting, the piano accompaniment is also a student. They are so talented! Can you imagine if middle school students in the US were forced to learn all kinds of songs and sing. The Japanese kids even sing different parts! Bass, tenor, alto, soprano! WOW. I think it's ok to post this, cause you can't really distinguish any faces. Apologies for the parts where the sound cuts out when I zoom.