At my university, Ohashi campus hosts an all weekend 4 day school festival every year. This is a strong tradition and I’ve been watching kids practice for it since I arrived 3 months ago. The entire school cancels class for one week and all the teachers understand that most of the kids will be too consumed building stages, exhibitions, practicing performances and setting everything up to come to class (which is quite nice of them). Each day has a special feature and are as follows: Day 1 – Student performed concert, Day 2 – Dance performance and club, Day 3 – Pro Wrestling and special art exhibition, Day 4 – Fashion show and closing ceremonies culminating in a gigantic bonfire of all the material used throughout the festival. This was in mid-November so I’m sorry for the late post. This is my attempt at making sure my blog is completely up to date before I leave for Tokyo for Christmas and New Years.
The Set Up
All the kids pitch in to help set up this event. It’s a completely student organized, student run event and I can’t emphasize enough how professional a job they did. Majoring in architecture I’m no stranger to having to build crap, but these kids can do things I never knew possible. First the main event of each day is all held in the same space. That means everyday they set up, use it for one event, tear it down, and set up the next event. Each set up was a massive undertaking. The entryway is completely transformed; entry tunnels are created, careful attention to lighting and craftsmanship details and inside the space is completely unrecognizable as each new day brings a completely new space. Outside, they’ve built a huge stage encircling in a large semicircle the school fountain. I was particularly amazed at how they were able to rig the even stage on many different levels as the fountain steps upwards. In the cafeteria they’ve made a coffee lounge where live music is scheduled throughout the day. Some of the classrooms display student work from various design majors including industrial, sound, architecture and graphic design. There was a main outdoor stage which had musical performances throughout the festival in the other quad. The students built their own professional wrestling ring out of empty plastic beer carrying cases as the base and various tarps and metal bars. HOW DID THEY DESIGN A PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING RING FROM BEER CASES?! I have no idea. But they are amazing. All throughout the school are booths with all types of foods and even a small foreign exchange section where the (one) Dominican Republic, Chinese, Korean and American students cooked their ethnic foods. We cooked “In N Out” style cheeseburgers with grilled onions, homemade thousand island sauce (they don’t have that here in the store) and melted cheese. They were extremely popular with the Japanese students who had never experience the concept of special “In N Out” sauce. And once we mentioned there was even cheese, many of them squealed for joy (literally, meat and cheese are kind of a commodity here).
Day 1 – The Concert:
I arrived late because I was not aware of how big a deal this whole festival was exactly or how good a job they would do. But I really regret not coming earlier. The building had a vortex-like opening created by sheets of foam core that formed a winding tunnel with spirals of multicolored light leading into the main stage area. (I have a video of just the entry cause it was so awesome) When we walked inside, there was so many people that the tunnel itself was backed up with kids. We could only see through a small gap and were quite eager to get in because we could hear and see glimpses of the crazy performance inside. Eventually, some people left and slowly we made our way inside which was completely packed to the brim with kids. Many of the performers in the concert (and throughout the festival) were students we knew and would see every day in class. They are normally shy and mostly keep to themselves or some friends in class, but at this performance they completely different people. The stifling restrictions of Japanese culture and daily expectations force the students and most working class people into two extremes: the quiet repressed individual in normal situations and the super crazy, borderline freakish (and often misunderstood by westerners) Japanese which are mostly what we see on crazy TV shows. So whenever they get the chance to really let out all their angst, either in a school festival or in karaoke, they really let it all go. The performances included every genre from sweet love ballad in huge flowing gown to heavy metal complete with full face paint and costume. They also did many popular American songs from bands like Muse and Rage Against the Machines. All the performers were very talented and I was surprised that somehow I had missed the fact that everybody in this school was either a professional dancer or singer on top of being full time students.
Those are all the performers and backstage hands. There might be more people on stage than in the audience, it was a massive group.
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