Culture Festival

Assume that it's December 11, 2012 while I'm typing this.  That'll help put things into perspective.

Junior High schools city-wide have just had their culture festivals this past weekend.  I went to two of them:  Yokogawa-chu’s on Friday and Makizono-chu’s on Saturday.  (This was a week ago.)

The students do a number of different things from plays to singing, to speeches.  While the idea is the same, the culture festivals atYokogawa and Makizono were quite different.  Yokogawa began with a series of English skits (which I had helped them with).  I was very proud of them and they put on quite a show!  They’re good actors.  That pretty much concluded the only part of the festival I understood.  But I enjoyed the dancing.  The dancing was probably the only time the students got to dress in street clothes. The second years at Yokogawa did a skit on Hiroshima, which was so packed full of emotion, I nearly cried.  The third years also did a skit, which for the most part I didn’t really understand, but they at least had good props and good acting.  They ended their festival with choir singing, and my JTE’s (Japanese teacher of English) class was by far the best out of all the classes in the school.

Makizono also had an outstanding performance.  One of my third year students had an English speech that she had been practicing for the past two weeks.  The first years did an interesting skit that, again, I didn’t understand at all.  But it was still entertaining and kind of funny.  The second years, like the ones at Yokogawa, did a skit on Hiroshima, but I have to say, Yokogawa’s was much better.  The morning performance was rather dull in my opinion, but I guess they were just waiting until the afternoon before the third years blew me away.  For three weeks, a professional taiko drummer had been teaching the students.  I had dropped in and participated on the first day of their training, so I knew it was coming.  But I wasn’t expecting the actual professionals to put on a show.  It was so spectacular!  There’s really no other way to describe it.  It was so loud that every beat of the big drums had my chair shaking.  They did two performances and then the third years joined them for one last performance.  I honestly couldn’t believe how much they had improved.  They must’ve practiced so hard.  Following that performance, the third years did a play, which just so happened to be the same play the third years at Yokogawa put on.  Makizono, however, put on a much better show.  They added humour and Super Mario sound effects, and the main character acted so well.  I was really impressed.