Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Are School Culture Festivals Really Like?
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Doc
 Posts: 86 Location: United States |
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The past 3 years I have attended a culture festival at a high school in Sapporo. We take a group of exchange students each year. It's a great experience and we always feel welcome. I have found it to be pretty on par to what you would see in an anime. However, I have yet to see a class do a maid cafe but there are usually plenty of haunted houses and a lot of unique game rooms. I really enjoy the club exhibits from manga and photography clubs to archery and science demonstrations and then the closing usually features a music group and awards for posters, rooms and floats.
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9829 Location: Virginia |
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I am so glad I never went to a school that had anything like this. In all the high school anime I've seen, I've never seen a Cultural Festival activity I could have participated in voluntarily or otherwise.
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Great Rumbler
 Posts: 327 Location: Oklahoma |
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At the schools I went to we had two festival-style events: October carnival with lots of food and games [this was mostly a way for classes to raise a little money] and a Christmas pageant [this was only during pre-high school years; each class did a song/short play]. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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I would imagine that's so common in anime because of the popularity of maid cafes with anime fans, as well as just being an excuse to get the female cast of a series set in a school into maid outfits. |
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ly000001
 Posts: 73 |
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Here are a couple of videos by an English speaker showing cultural festivals at different high schools:
https://youtu.be/yFkoJyZf2-s?t=43s https://youtu.be/bpiTK-GPw9Y |
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varmintx
 Posts: 1198 Location: Covington, KY |
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My school didn't have culture festivals. I think the most common bonding activity that students shared was trying not to get knifed.
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Does anybody know who pays for the festivals? Does the school pay for it? Do the students? Do the taxpayers? I know none of the schools I went to could've done anything quite towards the quality of what I'd see in anime because oftentimes, the students who'd WANT to do such a thing couldn't afford to pay for all the equipment. But what I see in anime looks pretty professional. If they're cooking food, they seem to be using restaurant-grade equipment. If they're doing carnival games, they seem to look indistinguishable from actual carnival activities. How have they managed to perpetually avoid the posterboard and glue that American schools' student-made stuff is always made of? I always thought they WERE getting help from adults because there's no way students alone could pull off the stuff I'd see in anime.
You and me both. We also had whatever is the opposite of school spirit, in which some students would attempt to disrupt school activities and troll the faculty. I guess teenage rebelliousness is not as strong in Japan. |
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Galap
Moderator
 Posts: 2354 |
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Sounds pretty much in line with my experience. |
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princess passa passa
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You answered your question cus that stuff only exists in anime. So far, in Japan I've seen the cardboard variety but they are very creative and some stuff looks really good. But it's all duct tape and paper clips really. I've never been to cultural festival that has kids doing a cafe or the like, maybe hand out some popcorn or something but real food is handled by the PTA and you have to pay for it. |
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rizuchan
Collector Extraordinaire Posts: 974 Location: Kansas |
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I would assume the school budgets for it like anything else, and the clubs' festival activities come out of the club budget. And I'm sure there are lots of students that pay for extra materials themselves or bring things from home. So I guess in most cases you could say "the tax payers" paid for it, although I'm pretty sure Japan has a much larger percentage of private schools than the US does. And I have no problem believing that teenagers could put together a fairly polished display without much adult assistance. Like Justin explains, much less is expected of the younger kids. |
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Compelled to Reply
 Posts: 358 |
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I didn't realize being a criminal by bringing a knife to school, and teenage rebellion as a natural psychological development stage were the same. Of course, the reason you seldom see that kind of stuff in realistic schools in anime is because it's usually a typical suburban middle class setting rather than clusters of Japan's notoriously bad schools which exist.
Most countries which don't follow the French system dominated by public schools are. Comparable with the United States, private schools can receive public funding outside religious activity, except can still be contentious to public counterparts who claim to be underfunded. |
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CandisWhite
Posts: 282 |
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I went to a country high school. We never had the lavish, everybody in, stuff done for the public seen in anime. Anything that big was done for students. The sorts of things that people did do, such as competitions, plays, and food events were fundraisers or demonstrations and were centered around classes or clubs. e.g. culinary studies or drama or sports teams It's not that big of a stretch to use equipment from the classrooms for these events; This stuff is used for years by many kids and has been considered an investment. It's not about spending thousands for this one event. Carnival stuff, for example, could be made by Woodshop, filled with food or goods from Cooking or Fashion, and manned by the kids wanting to earn the money. We had a snack shop that was staffed by volunteers raising money for their respective projects/clubs. Of course, teachers are going to help but the idea is to foster independence in the kids; If an anime centers around kids, the teachers are going to be secondary or background noise, anyway. I get the impression your experience is with inner city schools. The pool I go to is in a park near a Boys and Girls club; I imagine the local schools are always worried about money and would be just as hard up for festivals and the like, mirroring your experience. On the other hand, there's a high school 15 min. away (if traffic is good) near a mall in a middle class neighborhood which I'm sure, other than being a city school, would offer the same sorts of experiences that I had. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Ah, all right then. It always kind of confused me because I never saw anything of that quality in anime at the schools I went to unless the kids had adult help (either teachers, faculty, or parents), even in high school. It was only when I reached a four-year college that I was seeing professional-looking stuff come out of students on their own.
Well, why else would students bring knives to school? They do it because they think it's edgy and to upset the adults. Criminal behavior is shunned by most adults. Therefore, teenagers see it as cool to do. Obviously, teenage rebelliousness can manifest in many different ways. My point, though, is that rebellious behavior in general seems to be quite downplayed in Japanese schools. You don't see quite as much unruly activity with no purpose other than to annoy or threaten teachers, and those Japanese delinquents seem pretty harmless for the most part.
Did your schools have really nice stuff too? Because my schools had severely outdated, aging, and worn down or outright broken equipment for the most part. It basically looked a lot like Springfield Elementary as depicted in The Simpsons episode "The PTA Disbands!," in which the school can't afford anything and spends its entire budget just trying not to implode, and elective classes were getting axed left and right. It does make sense, narratively, that teachers would be hands-off with these school festivals, and I'm not surprised that it reflects how it is in real life too. I take it the teachers take consultant roles though, with the students asking for advice if they're not sure what to do next or how to make their displays look better.
All my schools were actually in the suburbs, and my middle and high schools were in middle to upper-middle income neighborhoods. It's just that, well, it's the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is infamous for its terrible conditions and rock-bottom funding, so every school was like this. From what I can gather, most of the high-income parents, fearing the LAUSD's reputation, put their kids through private schools and charter schools; as a result, the public schools comprised mostly of students from low-income and poverty-income households, so no one had any budget to do anything. The teachers were terrific people...it's just that their hands were tied at every turn, and liability issues prevented any interesting event from happening. We DID have an event in middle school though, in which groups would sell stuff in the auditorium, which is the closest thing I ever saw to a Japanese school festival. Our booth kept getting trashed and the money stolen. The thieves were courteous enough to return the empty money boxes back to us though. I remember seeing documentaries about life in prisons and was both surprised and a bit horrified to find out how similar they were to life at the schools I went to. I've also seen them compared to kennels, as their purpose to some parents is just a place to keep them contained somewhere for the day. Those prison inmates, though...they felt like people who never matured past some of the students I'd see in middle and high school. I swear, those guys act so similar to these no-goodniks. For the record, in no way am I suggesting that teenagers in bottom-level income households are criminals, more likely to be criminals, or more likely to be criminals when they become adults. Rather, the way students are just crowded together, rounded up, mostly ignored, given zero power over their lives, and given nothing interesting to do creates a sort of aggressive frustration that mirrors the behavior seen in prison. Last edited by leafy sea dragon on Fri Sep 15, 2017 3:30 am; edited 2 times in total |
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Narutofreak1412
 Posts: 338 |
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Our school didn't have any festivals. I wish we had, it looks really fun :/
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Compelled to Reply
Posts: 358 |
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[quote="leafy sea dragon"]
The way you put it sounded like they would bring a knife to school to threaten somebody. Also, buying a fighting knife is quite hard in Japan, hence the troupe you often see in animanga where kids wield razor blades. |
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