Peter's Keisuisai School Festival Page!

All right. I've got tons of pictures of the school festival. Let me give you a brief synopsis of the whole thing, and then I'll explain individual photos as necessary. It seems that every year every middle school in Japan has a big "festival". At our school this year, it was called "Keisui Sai". As I'm writing this, I'm not sure what that means, but I'll check. In any case, it's a huge two-day festival which the students and teachers have been preparing for non-stop for the last two weeks. School has kind of been an afterthought, and definitely secondary to the festival preparation.

The first day was all inside the gym. There were plays, school chants, lots of music, and some club demonstrations. It was pretty neat, but pretty quiet. The second day was a wild day outside. There were all kinds of team competitions, most of which were foreign (ha, ha--foreign) to me. Both days were non-stop action for about 8 hours. Here's the pictures:

Day One!

From L-R: The Principal; Romeo and Juliet; a punk band called "Fairy Tale"(yes, those are kimonos); and The Whole School Singing

Day Two!

O.K. L-R: The first two are the group jump rope, with at least 20 students jumping each rope. Next is large-group performance art (that's all 160 students in the school). 4th is a group cheer. 5th and 6th are a "many-legs-walk", kind of like a massive 3-legged race (all of their legs are tied to the person next to them), with the principal looking on in the 5th.

The next two are "walking on the back" races, which are wild--the student in the green jersey has to walk maybe 60 yards on the backs of his classmates--and there aren't 60 yards worth of backs, so after he steps on a classmate's back, the classmate then runs ahead of him to be stepped on again. The last two pictures are group photos of the 1st grade (we'd call them 7th grade) classes which I included because I'm in them.