Sensei Diaries #63: Gasshuku

June 27, 2025

I guess I lied when I said in my previous post that “Sensei Diaries #63 is coming soon.” I’m sorry about that. It wasn’t on purpose. Even I didn’t think it would take me a half a year for it to happen. There’s not a whole lot to say about it other than my lifestyle changed with the re-introduction of the cello into my life—I played from 5th grade to college, stopped playing for about 20 years, and have now restarted and joined an orchestra—and my writing time, as it fits into my daily routine, has been reduced and completely restructured as a result. That’s all there is to it.

But I am still here. And Sensei Diaries is still here. I would like to try to write weekly again, but that may not happen. Biweekly, perhaps? Monthly? I’ll just give it a try and see what works for me…

Gasshuku

My orchestra had a gasshuku over the last weekend in May, which is essentially a group overnight trip that’s kind of like a training camp. Japanese culture is chock full of gasshuku—pretty much every Japanese person is guaranteed to have attended at least one gasshuku as a student, and most will take part in several throughout their lives—and they generally follow the same outline: a group goes somewhere in the countryside to stay at a hotel or dormitory and experiences a few days of hyper-focused, intensive practice of whatever it is that they’re working on. In school, nearly every club or sports team will have a gasshuku once or twice a year. We also have class gasshuku for team-building. I attend one every year with students: an “English Immersion Gasshuku” in which we require the students to speak 100% English for the entire 2 and a half days of the camp.

There are some pretty unexpected gasshuku concepts out there, too. My calligraphy teacher actually runs a gasshuku twice a year where people go and just do calligraphy together all day for 2 days, 1 night. The strangest instance of gasshuku that I’ve heard of is actually one that is quite common: the Driver’s License Gasshuku. The path to getting a driver’s license in Japan is notoriously stringent and expensive. It also takes a heck of a long time—training through lessons takes months and you will likely fail the final test several times before you finally pass. You can get around all of that, however, by going to a Driver’s License Gasshuku. For 2 weeks you will stay at a hotel nearby a Driving School and you spend 14 days doing nothing but driving lessons, and at the end of it you’re guaranteed a license. It’s still an expensive process—it will cost you thousands of dollars—but knowing that you can get it all done in one fell swoop makes it worth it, I suppose. High school students generally aren’t allowed to have licenses (technically they can drive mopeds at age 16, but most schools have policies against it), so I have heard of several students doing the Driver’s License Gasshuku right after graduation so that they can drive by the time they start university. I guess that makes sense, but it still seems strange to me—like if in the process of trying to get a marriage license you decide to move in with the priest for a month.

The only gasshuku I had ever attended before were the ones I worked at as an instructor, so this was my first time going as a participant. I took the train about an hour outside the city to a small town on the northwest side of Lake Biwa. There was a beautiful view of the lake from the train on the way to the gasshuku—the azure expanse spread out, sun-kissed and tranquil, with the faint shadow of the mountains on the far side looming above—but once we arrived, that surrounding view became totally moot. For 2 days we stayed indoors and did nothing but practice and practice and practice—stopping only for 30-minute meal breaks, and to sleep.

Two days before the gasshuku I got a call from the first-chair cellist asking if I had a preference of who I shared a room with for the overnight. “There is still space for you to stay with the string players,” she said. “Or you can stay in the big room with the horn section.”

“It doesn’t really make a difference to me,” I answered.

“Well, it should. How much do you want to sleep?”

“What do you mean?”

“The string players will probably sleep early, and the horn players will probably be up partying all night.”

So apparently, even within the world of classical music, there are different levels of ‘cool,’ and the strings are the squares. Horns are the jocks.

My middle school brain kicked in, and I instinctively wanted to be put with the ‘cool kids,’ so I told her to put me with the horns. And that’s how I ended up staying up until 3:00 a.m., sharing whiskey shots with the trombonists, and comparing notes on the composers we’ve played. The next day of rehearsal was pretty rough.

By the end of the trip—at the end of the second day—my fingertips were numb and my arms and shoulders ached in a way that was entirely unfamiliar to me. It. Was. Fantastic.

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the phrase “collective effervescence” to describe the elation people feel when they gather together as a congregation and simultaneously participate in the same action. He uses it to explain his theory of religion primarily, but I would say it goes far beyond religious gatherings. Think of going to see a sports game, or attending a ComicCon, or a Gathering of the Juggalos—there’s a magical electricity in the air when so many people come together all for the same purpose. I feel it when I play, too; there’s a world of difference between practicing the cello at home by myself, and playing together with the entire orchestra. There is something magical—almost spiritual—about making music as a group rather than an individual.

Maybe it’s that high that is the key to why gasshuku are such a common practice here. Daily life in Japan can be surprisingly isolating. Even though the cities are jam-packed with people, everyone’s sense of social courtesy actually penetrates so deeply that people hardly interact with one another out of respect. Going away for a couple of days together with your peers and joining together for a common goal breaks down all those barriers and makes you feel connected again. The collective effervescence is intoxicating.