Today was the first day of my school's culture festival, although it was terrible weather for it. We had hard rain and strong winds all day thanks to the typhoon. The festival was inside, but it was much colder than usual for this time of year, and the sound of the rain beating down on the roof was constant. The students spent the morning in last-minute preparation, then the festival began at noon. The school acapella girls choir sang a few songs, including an awesome acappella version of the Lupin III theme song, then each grade did a presentation about some special activity they'd done. One thing that impressed me was a presentation on a handicapped man who had visited the school and talked about life with a disability. I may give the Japanese school system a lot of grief (with good reason), but at both of the schools that I've taught at, handicapped speakers have come to talk to the students, which is a program that I respect. The third years all went to a nursery school, which, to my cynical eyes, was at least partially supposed to get them to like babies so they'd all breed more pure Japanese. Gotta to raise that birth rate, you know. After all that, there was time for the visitors to walk around the school and look at the students' various class projects on display.
The third years all made hypothetical timelines of their lives from birth until their eighties or so. One girl, hopefully just as a joke, wrote that she expected to die in her fifties, so she wrote 'heaven' in the spaces beside her sixties and seventies. After some time to look at the projects, the visitors went back to the gym to hear the brass band club play. One of their pieces was called "Eurobeat Disney Medley" and was played to a march around the stage. For an encore, they played "Tequila," which gave me Pee Wee's Big Adventure flashbacks. I explained a little about Pee Wee's Playhouse to an English teacher, but I left out the sordid details of Paul Reuben's fall from grace. Tomorrow all the students will sing the songs they've been practicing. I'm also looking forward to the faculty party in the evening.

Today all the students at my school were preparing for the culture festival that's tomorrow and sunday. Since I'm so tall, they asked me to help them hang up posters and things like that. In the gym, we put up colored cellophane stained glass covers over the windows. There'll be a choir and poetry contest there tomorrow and sunday. The students are also displaying what they've made in their art, calligraphy, home ec, and shop classes in their classrooms. The third years all painted self-portraits and made clocks, while the second years made CD wallets and painted pictures based on kanji. The first years printed up T-shirts and made little wooden cabinets. I couldn't enjoy it all as much as I wanted to, since I'm getting sick. My nose was runny all day and I didn't bring any tissue with me to school, so I had to keep bumming them off people nearby. In other news, two teachers had to wash the dye out of a student's hair in the teachers room this morning. They even found one of those clear plastic smocks for him to wear. I also gave the first year English teacher a brief history of Japanese pop culture in the US. It turns out that his brother is a big Japanese monster movie fan and goes down to Tokyo to buy models and toys. On the Japanese culture front, tonight is supposed to be a special moon-viewing (月見) night, but it's been raining hard all day because of a typhoon, so that looks like a bust.