The Mysteries of Bunkasai
Japanese high schools annually celebrate a festival called "bunkasai." The term literally means culture (bunka) festival (sai). The event itself is a two day extravaganza, but preparations for the event begin months in advance. In fact, the students were already planning for bunkasai when I arrived in Japan in August! Here is a portrait of my bunkasai experience.
My first glimpse of the event came from Katie. Her school in Ise had their festival about a month and a half before the Toba high festival. She told me to expect pandemonium and had pictures to prove that it would be.
As the countdown reached "one month until bunkasai," I was beginning to believe that the Toba festival would be much more placid. There was no insanity. The students practiced their dances after school and I found a few of them making a film, but other than that school life continued as normal.
Two weeks to bunkasai. No insanity. What was Katie talking about?
At one and a half weeks until bunkasai I started to become overtly curious. What was this bunkasai thing? At that point I still didn't even know the English translation. I thought it was just a big party. It was time to conduct some research...
I walked into one of my classes with my co-worker and friend Ken (who happened to be team teaching with me that day) and began to interrogate the students: "Ohayo gozaimasu, good morning." "Good morning," droned the class. "Sooo, today I thought it would be fun if we talked about bunkasai." Their eyes perked when they hear the word bunkasai, but they stared at me suspiciously.
For the next fifty minutes I learned the basic logistics of bunkasai. Every class decorates their homeroom, puts on a performance of some sort and cooks a dish to be sold on the second day of the festival (I bought tickets to each of the class meals and ate for six consecutive hours...Hahahaha!) However, the class' explanation only provided the bare bones of bunkasai. As you can see from the photo below, we concluded that "Bunkasai is shrouded in mystery." Each class keeps everything a secret so that the festival itself is full of surprises...and it was.
At about one week until bunkasai I was walking down the hallway to one of my classes, when I saw something quite strange out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see a class, proceeding as usual BUT half of the class was sitting inside of a large wooden structure that had been erected sometime over the previous evening. Mysterious indeed...
My first glimpse of the event came from Katie. Her school in Ise had their festival about a month and a half before the Toba high festival. She told me to expect pandemonium and had pictures to prove that it would be.
As the countdown reached "one month until bunkasai," I was beginning to believe that the Toba festival would be much more placid. There was no insanity. The students practiced their dances after school and I found a few of them making a film, but other than that school life continued as normal.
Two weeks to bunkasai. No insanity. What was Katie talking about?
At one and a half weeks until bunkasai I started to become overtly curious. What was this bunkasai thing? At that point I still didn't even know the English translation. I thought it was just a big party. It was time to conduct some research...
I walked into one of my classes with my co-worker and friend Ken (who happened to be team teaching with me that day) and began to interrogate the students: "Ohayo gozaimasu, good morning." "Good morning," droned the class. "Sooo, today I thought it would be fun if we talked about bunkasai." Their eyes perked when they hear the word bunkasai, but they stared at me suspiciously.
For the next fifty minutes I learned the basic logistics of bunkasai. Every class decorates their homeroom, puts on a performance of some sort and cooks a dish to be sold on the second day of the festival (I bought tickets to each of the class meals and ate for six consecutive hours...Hahahaha!) However, the class' explanation only provided the bare bones of bunkasai. As you can see from the photo below, we concluded that "Bunkasai is shrouded in mystery." Each class keeps everything a secret so that the festival itself is full of surprises...and it was.
At about one week until bunkasai I was walking down the hallway to one of my classes, when I saw something quite strange out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see a class, proceeding as usual BUT half of the class was sitting inside of a large wooden structure that had been erected sometime over the previous evening. Mysterious indeed...
posted by Christopher Janca at 3:51 a.m.
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