It's a sunday morning and I'm sitting here in my apartment waiting to chat with my parents (for the first time in over three months, actually), and I thought I'd splash some random words onto the internet until Six Thirty Pacific Standard Time rolls around and I link up with the motherandfathership, so let's see. Hard to say what exactly I want to say, considering the biggest thing on my horizon right now(pretty much the only thing on my horizon right now, actually) is a little under two months away and furthermore nothing relavant to just about anybody who might be reading this blog (wink), but there are actually two kinda neat things coming up this week that I can detail some. The first is something the kids are doing, and the second is something I hope I can make the kids do. On thursday they got this "Talent Show" type thing, but I'm not expecting a small little affair in the gym composed of groups of kids performing sloppy karaoke or imitating Kojima Yoshio (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1utN8BWudf0&NR=1) (this guy is fucking weird as shit, but was a total phenomenon over here for a while, which makes sense). Nope, there will be nothing impromptu or shoddily performed about this particular talent show, considering that the kids have been practicing for it for since about May, at least twice a day during lunch and after school. Not to mention the time they spend during fifth and sixth period studying recordings of themselves practicing.
Let me back up a moment to see if I can't get this to make some more sense. On Thursday, my school will have it's Gakkogei happyokai, which roughly roughly roughly translates to Talent Show/ Chorale Contest, and as my translation makes clear it is split up into two sections. The first part I am a little unclear about, but think that it involves individual students or perhaps groups of students performing something, anything, they've prepared by themselves and proved to the powers that be to be of high enough caliber to show to all the collection of parents, administrators, and local daimyo who are going to be filling up the 1200 seat auditorium they will be performing at. I think during this segment of the performance we will get to see anything from sweet guitar solos, to a performance from a band or two maybe, probably some piano pieces, speaches in English (shudder), probably speaches in Japanese, and maybe a dance or two thrown in for effect. That will be fun, but it's all just stage dressing for the second part of the show, which is what everybody is looking forward to. In Japanese middle schools, the kids are all divided into classes called kumi, and instead of traveling around the school to rooms occupied by different teachers, the kids stay in the same room all day and the teachers come to them. For this contest, each kumi is given a song to perform, and they compete against the other kumi to do perform their song the best and win points for their color. Let me explain this, there are five colors in the school, not unlik the four houses in Harry Potter other than the fact that there are five of them and they just have colors instead of the names of the schools founders, and each color group is composed of a kumi from each grade. So for example the Aogumi (blue group) is made up of a kumi form the first, second, and third year students. At various events throughout the year, they compete against each other and the different grades can win points for their color kumi. There's a board in the front of the school displaying the points. So exactly like Harry Potter, basically.
Well, I think this contest is one of the bigger point getters for the whole year, so the kids are bustin their balls to be the best. I, however, have to go put a shirt on some I'm decent for my family, but, check this link out to hear one of the songs they sing. It's called, Adventure in the Carribean Sea of Dreams (basically), and it rules. I'll translate it later. These aren't my kids, by the way, there is just a very select number of songs Japanese kids sing at these contests. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mngzBdQeDEs
I'll finish this shit later.
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