Last week our school had its annual Bunkasai. Bunkasai translates to “Cultural Festival” in English, and it is one of the two most iconic school events within Japanese culture—the other being Taiikusai, or “Sports Festival”—akin to the Prom or Homecoming in American schools. As such, it is something that is often used as a backdrop for climactic scenes in pop culture like manga and anime, or TV shows and movies—again in much the same way a lot of American teen movies reach their dramatic climax at the Prom. Whenever I mention Bunkasai in conversation with my Japanese friends, they always have strong memories of their own Bunkasai experiences in high school.
Bunkasai is not only an event, it’s actually an integral part of the education. Bunkasai are specifically built into the school curriculum that is nationally mandated by the government’s Ministry of Education, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT). According to MEXT’s own explanation of the role of special activities in education:
“School events are educational activities that are organized by the school, but rely upon the participation and teamwork of students to be carried out... In the Cultural Festival, students are expected to actively create and present their own independent and practical activities. It is important that the students fully understand the meaning of the event and cooperate and participate of their own volition, and it is necessary for teachers to provide guidance and assistance to ensure that the children can understand the importance of fulfilling their responsibilities, and feel a sense of satisfaction from that fulfillment.”
You can see how this intentionally works to instill one of the primary cultural values of Japanese society: working as a productive member of society for the greater prosperity of the nation.
Life at high school for a Japanese student revolves around the homeroom. With a few exceptions for elective classes, students spend all day every day in the same classroom with the same group of students, which is meant to function as a microcosm of society and the various other groups a Japanese person will find themselves in throughout their adult life, chief among which is the workplace. Students learn how to navigate the ins and outs of workplace relations through the trial and error process of managing relationships with their homeroom classmates. When problems between students arise, students are usually expected to figure out how to resolve those conflicts on their own with minimal guidance from teachers. That has been particularly difficult for me to wrestle with as a homeroom teacher, as I find myself constantly wanting to intervene when I see kids having trouble getting along, or what is more often the case: one kid is totally oblivious to how he or she is willfully hurting their relationship with the other students.
For most of the year, though, students are mainly focused on their schoolwork and don’t even necessarily have to interact with their classmates, so they can avoid conflict when it arises if need be. That’s where Bunkasai comes in. The Cultural Festival only happens across one or two days of school (two at our school), but it involves months of preparation. Since before summer vacation, our homerooms have been hard at work planning and preparing their independent showcases. The school provides a framework for the event, which determines what kind of showcase the students can make, but within those parameters students make all the decisions and executions on their own, including choosing committees and leaders, drawing up plans, budgeting and managing funds, procuring the necessary equipment, and all the setup and teardown on the event days. All this, by the way, is happening in addition to their regular schoolwork, which means that almost all of the preparations happen outside of regular class hours. Thus, the Cultural Festival becomes yet another reason why students in Japan spend so much of their time at school.
For our school in particular, there are a couple of showcases that every homeroom in the whole school participates in, while others are separated by grade level. In the whole school, each homeroom designs and creates a class t-shirt to be worn on the festival days. Some classes will put a roster of all the students’ names on their shirt, and others will have some kind of a play on words with the homeroom teacher’s name. For the last two years I’ve been teaching my students the value of the African philosophy of community known as “Ubuntu” (“I am because we are”), so the for last year’s class t-shirt students made a design with “Ubuntu” written in block letters across the back. This year, my attention is actually split between two homerooms as the deputy homeroom teacher for each, so I got two t-shirts: one with Betty Boop on a motorcycle, and one with Hello Kitty in a black Spiderman costume. I asked students why they chose those designs, and the only answer offered to me was, “Because it’s cute!” So I guess they don’t always have to carry a deep meaning—or even any meaning at all.
Homerooms also work together to make a large collage—about one meter wide by two meters in height—in an art style called chigiri-e, which just means “picture from torn up paper.” The theme this year was “modern history,” and each homeroom was assigned a year, which they had to make a chigiri-e to represent. One of my class’s years was 1983, which was the release year of the Famicom (the Japanese name of the original Nintendo game console), so they made an 8-bit style image of Super Mario in front of Princess Peach’s castle. The other class made an image of Mr. Potato Head to represent 1995, the release year of Toy Story. Maybe not the most notable events of either year, but you can see where their interests lie. Some other interesting classes’ works included collages of Darth Vader (1978, the release year for Japan), E.T. (1982), Kiki (1989), Freddie Mercury (1991), MarioKart (1992), and Tamagotchi (1997—they actually released the year before, but became a hit in ‘97). The others were mostly related to anime of various sorts, but I did especially appreciate one class’ reference to a particular politician that became a viral YouTube hit in 2014 when he went on national TV to make a public apology about the misappropriation of funds and ended up wailing and crying hysterically at the press conference. (I recommend you take a minute to watch that video if you haven’t seen it—it’s really unprecedented)
By grade level, each class also puts together some kind of performance. 10th graders have a choral contest, so each homeroom practices a song for about a month beforehand. I am quite proud to say that when I was a 10th grade homeroom teacher two years ago, my homeroom won the contest with their rendition of “This is Me” from The Greatest Showman, which I’m told is the first time in the school’s history that an English song has taken home the top prize. 11th graders put together short plays that they write and produce all on their own. They are most often a riff on some well-known story or whatever is popular in the zeitgeist of the year. And 12th graders can do a performance of any kind they want. As seniors, it’s their last hurrah, so they’re given quite a lot of leeway to do whatever they want on stage, sometimes even beyond the point of what I would have thought was appropriate: this year, I watched in shock and amazement as—in one particular class’s performance—a group of 6 boys took the stage to perform what I’m assuming was meant to be a comedic ‘ballet’ rendition of Swan Lake, wearing makeshift ballet costumes that consisted of tight white shirts with the nipple areas blacked out, and spandex white shorts with a long, curved white balloon stuffed into the front of their shorts in a way that was clearly meant to be a double euphemism for the swan’s neck and the boys’ penises. Don’t believe me? Have a look for yourself:
These performances are practiced for a month in advance under supervision of the homeroom teacher, so it certainly passed scrutiny. And I looked around the room and watched parents and other colleagues of mine laughing and cheering them on, so clearly our cultural sensibilities for what is appropriate don’t exactly match up.
Another point where our sensibilities differ—one that I’ve seen so much that it no longer actually surprises me—is cross-dressing. Not that cross-dressing itself is inappropriate, but rather the fact that it is a go-to for an easy laugh to have a boy (particularly a jock) dress up in a skirt and a wig and stuff their shirt with fake boobs, and that it always, without fail, gets the biggest cheers. Every. Single. Time. Year after year. It is the very essence of lowest-common-denominator humor (if you can even call it humor), and would be considered a slap in the face to any trans audience member, but Japan is about 2 decades behind the U.S. when it comes to culturally normalizing LGBTQ+ people and issues. What am I going to do; admonish the entire school and PTA for their insensitivities that they don’t even have context enough to understand? To be honest, my biggest complaint isn’t that it’s culturally insensitive; as a fan of comedy, I’m annoyed that it’s just not funny! I take my small victories where I can get them, though: this year I was extremely proud of my own homerooms that they had absolutely zero cross-dressing in their performance, nothing inappropriate, and they crushed it.
The 12th graders also are tasked with putting together some kind of carnival booth for the festival. Some classes created carnival games, like ring tosses or darts games. Others put together flea market style booths selling charms they made by hand, or secondhand goods they collected from their homes. All of this, again, becomes instructional: it gives students a low-stakes experience of organizing a small business venture. Students plan everything on their own: they decide on their goods or services, make a budget, settle on prices, make sales pitches, create a schedule of work shifts, and do their own accounting. My homerooms this year made a fake fortune telling booth and a photo booth. Both did fairly well, but the fortune telling booth did a great deal better. The photo booth class overestimated how much people would be willing to pay for a photo—even a physical polaroid—when everyone carries a high-powered camera in their pockets. The fake fortune telling booth, on the other hand, was selling an experience. They cracked jokes, they flattered their customers, they told people things that they wanted to hear. And with a very low overhead cost—they just spent a bit of money on some cheap costume accessories—it went gangbusters.
There are some other performances that happen throughout the festival, too. Students that want to show off their own talents can book their own 10-minute slot on stage. These are mostly musical in nature—band or dance performances—but occasionally you get some comedy shows as well, which are usually quite good. Notable performances for me this year came from students in my own homerooms: two bands which were great, and a mind-blowing rap performance in English from one of the most quiet and soft-spoken boys I have ever taught. The bands and the rapper also came together for a final collaboration to close out their trio of sets and it was awesome to see these students join hands for a final blowout.
The school’s brass band, dance club, and baton twirling club also put on their big showcases, and the latter two are probably the biggest attractions of the whole festival. The packed gym fills with screams and cheers from the audience as soon as each club takes the stage, and it is an unrelenting cacophony all the way through to the end of their 15- to 20-minute stage times. It gets so loud that my Apple Watch quickly taps my wrist to warn me that staying in an environment with this decibel level could damage my ears. One of my colleagues smartly showed me that she brought earplugs just for that occasion.
All in all, Bunkasai is a really fun couple of days where you get to see students be themselves a lot more than you usually see in day-to-day lessons. It’s a treat for the students to have a break from the drudgery of studies, and a treat for teachers to kick back for a while and watch the students take control of things. I’m glad it’s over, though. As fun as it was, it was also surprisingly exhausting. Being on my feet for most of the days, walking around and watching stage performances and my homerooms’ carnival booths, and trying to support the students as much as possible was really tiring. I’m happy that I can ease back into my routine again now. Well, actually, I can’t do that quite yet because the Sports Festival is coming next week. But after that, for sure.