School Festival 2 (Bunkasai...kishikokosai)
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During the school festival, K-sensei came to crash at my place. I was a bit self-conscious since my place was an absolute mess with stuff everywhere and even garbage bags piled in one corner—I’m still trying to figure out what goes out on what day. You have to like be able to do abstract algebra to dispose of a bottle.

After she left, some of my clever JET friends had the insight to ask me, “So did you hook up with K-?” or I think one said, “Did you guys turn this into a love couch?” That’s the most ridiculous euphemistic phrasing I’ve heard this year. And no, I was a good Christian, better than most “Christians” I know, even though I don’t affiliate myself with Christianity or any other religion out there, although I’m thinking of starting an iconoclastic religion centered around the comedy of Family Guy.

Just as an interesting aside, the word for “love” in Japanese is “ow,” our word for something that hurts.

We went to the festival early to get in line for the “geki” (plays), and ran into a class I knew pretty well. I tried learning some other names, with moderate success. They were painting their nails green, the color of the sports team they would be on the following Monday, their “sports day” celebration, which is pretty much just a track and field day. After some pleading, I let a girl student paint my nails with “bly” and two hearts drawn on them in green and orange. I got lots and lots of complements on the nails in the week following that.

We got good seats and I struck up talking with some of the students around me. One of my better moves was figuring out how to say “lonely,” and “sensitive,” in Japanese, and then turning around to introduce one of the girls behind us to the boy sitting next to me. I introduced him as a “lonely and sensitive man.” Students are still talking about that one.

I also broke up a fan fight…yeah I don’t know how else to describe that. Everyone brings fans everywhere. And towels. Everyone has a feaking towel for sweat. Even I do now.

I was blown away by the plays. One word to sum them all up: intense. There was an intense samurai play that was for the most part serious, but had some odd slapstick humor to break things up in addition to the sweet fight scenes with super dramatic music. The kids broke like two swords by accident in the plays. And it wasn’t just guys hacking it out in the fights, there were some pretty scary girls kicking ass. It makes me feel as though my public education experience was missing something, specifically, sword fights. In other plays, they had a lot of old school video game music, from Mario Bros. to Zelda.

Cross-dressing was definitely popular among the guys, and there must have been at least one drag queen per play. In my favorite play, by my favorite class, the ones that painted my nails, they put on a version of the Japanese story “Peach Boy.” There were a lot of jokes even I could get where they start dancing weird to hokey music and things. Or someone was like dying and then they’ll spring up singing a Brittany Spears song or something.

One of the highlights was when an entire sang, “Dancing Queen,” as part of “Mama Mia.” God I wish I had that on video. Another memorable part was at the end of Peter Pan, when everyone was finished, this girl comes on and says, “arigato, Peter Pan,” and all the characters come on stage dancing to some video game music—pirates and lost boys alike. Such brilliant screenwriting.

When I went to look at the calligraphy, I got to see some pretty amazing things. One of the students interpreted a girl’s work as “porno. It’s a porno.” And he kept repeating himself until he was sure I got what he was saying. The girl was very embarrassed, and it was really something like, “wind from the moon through a window.” Boys will be boys, and sometimes girls like they were in the plays.

The other students had shops set up with food and crafts. I bought candy and gave it out to all the students I saw. They also had all kinds of strange games that involve fishing out balloons or rubber balls with tissue paper-plastic instruments. It’s hard to explain, but trust me, they do it.

I also got to see several of the school’s rock bands. They like punk rock. I like punk rock. They treat guitars like chainsaws; it’s awesome.

At night I was up late because K-sensei was trying to pack to leave the country, so I didn’t sleep much for a while.

Day two of the festival was a lot like the first, but there were people there before us even at 8:30 for a 9:00am start. By 11:00 the place was packed beyond the fire code—people were sitting in the isles and standing in the back of the auditorium to see the dance team. Japanese dances are difficult to describe. They put on the most extremely emotionally indulgent music possible at double time and with a thicker beat. The happy dance was very happy—I think it might even get Saddam Hussein to smile. Hey, whatever happened to that guy? Is he still alive? I gotta give him a call. One of the dances I was definitely not comfortable watching, but not as uncomfortable as the 80-yearolds in the front row waiting for their grandsons or granddaughters to star in Peter Pan or whatever. The best way I can describe it is that it’s as though the dance girls took all of their sexual and flirtation energy and compressed it into about a half-hour show. They smiled way to hard during the show, and then at the end they were all crying, “because they were sad it was over,” according to a student. I don’t get it.

The most awkward part was how some of the girls asked me if I liked their dances, and some, if I thought it was, “sexy.” There’s no right answer to that one, Christ. I wanted to say, “I’m not sure it was legal for me to watch,” but that’s hard to translate so I said, “I thought it was good.”

After the festival was over, we began getting things ready for the sports festival, which consisted of the entire school all pitching together as a functional team to transform the baseball field into a 200 meter track, one of the marvels of Japanese teamwork I’ve yet witnessed. Growing up with my dad, who couldn’t do manual labor without screaming and hurting himself multiple times, it was a rather strange experience to watch people move heavy things together without damaging any personal relationships. Truly, this must be witchcraft.

Then I practiced running with two of the other English teachers. There were five of the English teachers along with the other staff that were running two relays on sports day on Monday. I also had mentioned that we might make t-shirts for “Eigo no chiimu,” (English team), and two of the female teachers went to town before I could even begin to help and made hilarious t-shirts. They had a felt cut-out heart with the teacher’s name on the front and a crazy slogan on the back. Mine was “appears out of the blue,” which was funny to everyone that read it.

That night I talked a long time with K-sensei, who was taking off the next day. I had a hard time sleeping again. It’s hard sleeping by myself in the same room as an attractive female—one of those things you think you could get over as you mature, but I don’t think I’ll ever change.