culture and sports festival

文化祭 / 体育祭

Bunkasai/Taikusai 

culture festival/sports festival

Hello to todays post. Last week I had culture and sports festival at my high school and because this is a very unique event in Japan, I’d like to write about it. 

文化祭 > culture festival 

It is basically a day to celebrate the artistic achievements of the high school. This means there will be performances of the artistic clubs. In the case of my school these performances took place on the stage of our nearby culture hall. The brass-band gave a concert, the tea-ceremony-club organized a „lesson“ for parents and students to take part in, the art club made a stop-motion-animation movie and there also was a live writing-calligraphy-to-music performance. As I am a member of both the art and the calligraphy club, I had a tough schedule during the weeks leading up to our culture festival. It is (together with the sports festival) one of the biggest events during the school year, so everyone is really focused, eager to participate/help and excited! This goes along with longer hours spent at club and for me it also meant: coming home covered in paint and calligraphy-ink from head-to-toe for about three weeks. Please take my case very literally: I had black feet almost everyday after school. Why?, I hear you ask. Well, as I mentioned above: with the calligraphy club we rehearsed a live writing.

So how does something like that work? 

1. We chose something we wanted to write. Popular here are for example seasonal poems, quotes out of plays or other famous japanese literature. In our case, our calligraphy teacher created a text for us to write. Kind of like a cheering slogan about our school’s spirit.
2. We chose a song to write to: 22 by Taylor Swift
3. We settled on the choreography: Who writes which characters/words? What do the rest of us do, while someone’s writing? When does who start to write? etc.

4. Practice,Practice,Practice.

5. Be excited and perform on stage.

You see there’s a lot to organize beforehand. Well, all this took place on stage for everyone to watch and hopefully to enjoy. We wrote on a large version of the traditional calligraphy paper and used the biggest brushes available. Also because of the size of the paper and our characters (they should be visible for everyone to read) we walked on the paper while writing, which brings me back to the point. During practice sessions it was very likely that you stepped into another person’s writings, while writing yourself (because you were still unsure about coordinating your moves) which then lead to ink-black feet.

Also: the paper we wrote on is very expensive, so in order to not „waste“ the good performance paper, we actually practiced on old newspapers which we glued together and laid down on the floor. Now, calligraphy paper absorbs the traditionally used heavy ink fast, in order to prevent smears. But newspaper has a very cheap paper quality, so you’ll end up with ink puddles all around you, which are lovely *not* to step in. : D

For our performance there was a little extra step: Because I’m in the art club, my calligraphy teacher asked my to paint something on our performance paper, that should serve as a colorful, happy background. I asked everyone, what would fit our song and our writing the most and we voted it to be a rainbow. So I had the honor to design a gigantic rainbow for our performance paper, which we then painted on or paper together about a week before the culture festival. It was a lot of fun and also very touching/inspiring for me to see „my rainbow“ on the pictures my host mother took of us, lifting our work and presenting it to the crowd, at the end of our live-writing.

At my high school's culture festival there were also performances of the third year students (such as dances, movies and plays), food stands by the second year’s and games, organized by the first year students. I’m in the second year of senior high school here, so my classmates and I sold Ice-Cream floats. 

I experienced the culture festival as a very happy, very engaged and fun community event. It showed me once more how important it is, to „stand-together“ in order to create something nice for everyone to enjoy. This is a main thought at japanese schools (at least what my experience showed me so far) and therefore and because of the club activity system, there’s a lot of volunteers and a warm feeling of community and pride towards your school. It’s very nice and because everyone engages and practices/works really hard for it to be a fun event, there were so many creative ideas and the decoration of each classroom was super awesome! My school looked really pretty that day! For me, being an exchange student, it was also a great opportunity to really, strongly and truly feel part of my school. The calligraphy performance and displaying the movie we made in the art club was a huge amount of good feelings for me: happy, to be a part of something, to matter, to be included, to be cheered for and encouraged! My culture festival was great!

体育祭 > sports festival

So there is something like a sports day at my school in Germany (EBG-Sporttag), but it’s nothing like the Taikusai I experienced here! 

So first things first:

1. The whole school participates (all teachers, all grades) and there will come a lot of people from outside of school to watch and cheer. Not only parents and siblings will be there, but also people who live near the high school or former students, who might already be at university or even have a job and family now. This, again, represents that school is a strong center of community in Japan. In the weeks leading up to the culture and sports festivals many former students visited my high school, to talk with „their“ teachers and visit „their“ clubs. Often they brought Omiyage (jap. souvenir, most of the time in the form of sweets, typical for a certain area) with them, so the hard-working hours of finishing everything in time, turned into little food parties to catch up on each others lives. 
2. My high school got parted into three groups each group with a color as their name: white 白 red 赤 and blue 青 .  Each group then got about 10 leaders. These leaders are the authorities for the practice week (at my high school we had time to rehearse the games and performances during the week before the sports festival). The leaders, which you call leader-san リーダーさん, practice cheering chants, songs and marching with you. The teachers are basically not that important for one week.

The schedule of my sports festival:

1. First our three groups gathered in the back of our school ground-field, then the brass-band started to play and we marched in order and rythm(left, right, left, right) to the middle of the sports-field. There was an opening speech of my school principle and afterwards we marched back to our group’s place.
2. The games began: there are the typical competition games such as relay race, 50meters/100meters/200meters sprint races, but also some japanese sportive games: I’m going to explain yagiri as an example. Before that I’d like to add that all games at my high school’s Taikusai were separate for girls and boys, so there were always tow rounds. So basically you team up with your group’s girls, you choose one „runner“ and the fun begins. Every girl except the „runner“, bows, places their hands on their knees and tightens their back muscles. You stand very close together in order to create a „human-race-track“. Now the „runner“ will take the hand of one of your leaders, for balance, and run over your backs as fast as possible. Girls are supposed to compete at 100meters of Yagiri, which means, that after the „runner“ ran over your back, you straighten up and run to the front end of your „human-race-track“, bow down again and wait for your „runner“ to pass your back again. All this takes place on a line, which marks 100meters. All three teams (white, red, blue) will start the race at the same time and whoever finishes first, wins points for their group.    

   

   Yagiri

3. There were many more of these games and at each game you could win points for your group. 
4. After lunch break, there were two folk dances. These were also rehearsed with our leaders, earlier that week.
5. Last was my favorite part: The unique performances of our three groups. So I mentioned it earlier, that your leaders teach you chants and encouraging songs, but what do I mean by performances? Well, as I wasn’t allowed to use my phone during the sports festival I don’t have footage of MY sports festival, but I found a video of my school’s sports festival of three years ago, were you can see what these performances can look like. Here’s the link to the video: https://youtu.be/nGuxt2fBqd0
6. Explanation for the video: the shouts in Japanese are things like „Give your best!“ „Fight!“(the Japanese often yell that at sportive competitions. It’s meant as an encouragement.) „Stand together!“ and the names of your group leaders and your group (in my case we shouted: Hakugun 白軍, in case of the example video: Sekigun 赤軍). So if these performances are at the end of the festival, why do encouraging chants? Well, you are actually cheering for your group leaders, who perform a choreography. You, as their group, stand behind them and shout along to their choreography. The leaders are dressed in gowns made by „tailor-students“ of their group and they are painted in body-tattoos or wear make-up (like symbols that represent your group-color). They look super awesome! It’s really a fun show to watch! Also: this last act at the sports festival before the closing ceremony is another contest: in the end it will be decided which performance(including the dresses, the styling, the choreography, the rhythm, the chants and synchronicity) was the most skilled one.
7. Lastly the points of the sportive competitions will be counted and the winners will be presented. My group won first place for the best performance and placed 2nd at the sportive competitions.

I experienced the sports festival as a huge team-building-event and I enjoyed it very much! Also: the leaders of my group were very cool and even though strict during practice sessions, they were a lot of fun to hang out with afterwards. Coming home with aching muscles and paint and ink all over me, for a whole week before was totally worth it! Why am I repeatingly telling you, that it was hard? Well, because I want to show, that wonderful things/events can happen, if everyone is putting equal effort into them. Everyone worked with heart, body and soul to make the school festivals memorable and fun events. I will carry them in my heart forever! Especially because they brought me closer together with my classmates.

In the end I’d like to say: It is difficult to explain this feeling of „community“ I felt during culture and sports festival, but I wanted to try anyway, because for me, they were an „eye-opener“. I wish there was something like Bunkasai and Taikusai in Germany. Something like this „feeling of communty“. I really didn’t enjoy the festivals or project-days of my school back home in Germany. The majority of people at my school usually saw them as „compulsory“ and therefore they were simple anything but fun or important in their opinion. It was always the same people, who put effort in the preparations and in the end they failed because some students just didn’t participate at all and boycotted the fun. This made me feel sad and angry, because I always knew there could be a community at school and now I no longer only believe in that thought, but I’ve experienced it in Japan. I’m very happy to see, that it really can work out, if only everyone equally participated!

Thank you for reading by again and I’ll see you next time! 

PS: I’m currently working on a Q&A so make sure to click by soon. XOXO Avria

image by Google images