School Festival セルリアン祭

This past Friday and Saturday was my schools festival and the major cultural event of the school year. The staff and students alike had spent may months preparing for it. Japan has a surfeit of festivals but the school festival is an important event for everyone involved with the school. Though my own involvement was minimal, just spectating at the whole event was exhausting.
It started on Friday with essentially a four hour assembly. There were displays from various clubs and elective classes. The cheer leading club were first, followed by the drumming club. There followed hours of speeches that varied in quality and topic. One boy talked about how his home room class had made a giant mud ball one lesson. There were a few English speeches which I had proof read before and were delivered well. A girl talking about a social studies project was so overcome with nerves that she cried throughout her speech and barely got through it. She received loud applause when she eventually finished. The morning finished with six different groups doing choreographed dancing to various J-pop tunes. The length of this assembly was exhausting.
After lunch there were some sports events. First, a student led the entire school through an aerobics workout. There was class relay contests afterwards. The day ended with a class skipping (or jump rope in American English) contest.
The next day was dominated by musical events. Another four hour marathon assembly. First the brass band played through their repertoire (which includes "Smoke on the Water" bizarrely). There followed a singing contest judged by outside experts. Each class and each year group, the staff and the whole school had songs to sing in each of those subdivisions. I sang with the staff for the staff song. It was an Okinawan folk song. The lyrics were spelt phonetically (without Kanji to help deduce the meaning) and the song used antiquated grammar and Okinawan dialect so I had no idea of it's meaning and it would be have been an heroic to find out.
Nonetheless, it sounded nice and was short and easy to learn. I also sang with the whole school song which was about a rabbit that lives in the moon (a popular Japanese folk myth). After lunch the winners of the various competitions were announced and a full hour was spent to surmise and reminisce on the festivals events. With the best will in the world no-one can concentrate though eight hours of assembly in two days. I don't doubt the effort that went into the whole event but it suffered from the Japanese trait of effort for efforts sake. A smaller, leaner event would have easier to digest and saved the staff and students needless time and stress. Anyway, afterwards the staff could wind down as we all went for an 宴会 (enkai) or party.
The staff party was a showcase for all sorts of odd Japanese social behaviour. By a lottery people were seated and I ended up next to the headmaster and the former headmaster (a special guest). Both were charming but got very drunk. They said they were glad was from England before making a series of rude comments about the USA. The old headmaster quizzed me about English marriage tradition. He asked how important cooking ability was when choosing a future wife in England. I replied that it wasn't particularly important. He followed up by saying, "My wife is good at cooking. Good at bed too. Hahahaha." In Japan it is bad manners to pour your own drink; you should pour for other people and have the favour returned. The teachers were falling over themselves to refill the two Headmaster's glasses. I made sure I completed the ritual fairly soon so I didn't appear rude. It finished with the teacher in a circle singing the school anthem. The last AET, my predecessor Stuart, at this event last year got very drunk, took his trousers off, ran home and had to be picked up the headmaster in his car lest the police find him. That proved to be fatal for his relationship with the school staff. I judiciously decided to retire early rather than join the teachers for the follow up drinks in town. And so it finished.