Every year, junior high schools and senior high schools in Japan host a few major events for study, for fun, for character-building, and to invite people who are usually too busy working to come anyway, their families, and one of these is the Culture Festival.

Tsushima High School hosted its culture festival on a Sunday, so Rose and I were able to go check it out, thus we were one epic hill walk away from interest and intrigue.

School culture festivals are comprised primarily of three things:

1. Classrooms decorated on certain themes, arts, areas of study, or people.
2. Food booths with tasty things for sale.
3. Dance and music performances.

Upon arrival and locating Duncan, the new high school ALT paid to “work” by being in attendance for the day plus a day off for the sacrifice of a Sunday, the three of us partook in some traditional tea ceremony in the school courtyard. That came free with a rather ceremoniously served pastry and vessel with a modest amount of delicious matcha by little women in kimono.

First one is served the pastry, then the creamy green tea.

Normally tea ceremony takes place in a very traditional tatami house, in a room that one crawls in to not only out of ceremony but because the entryway is a square hole in a wall. However, the high school naturally doesn’t have its own tea house.

The classrooms had a wide range of themes.  One had cartoon renditions of all of the staff drawn by the students. Another was a Halloween-themed vampire’s crypt, another profiled some foreign countries, a science room provided attendees the opportunity to extract genetic material from broccoli, and yet another had a large map of the island on the floor marked with real seashells.  Even cooler in the latter room was the arrangement of rubbish collected from beaches around the island, in a sort of respect-the-Earth message way.

Mountains marked by seashells.

Another room featured large models of Anpanman and his rival, Baikinman.

Incredibly artwork by a Japanese high school student.

Sadly Rose and I arrived after the Culture Festival Marketplace closed, so we missed out on some tasty Japanese foods, which apparently also sold out rather rapidly.  Still, a former student of mine and one of the many I miss handed me a free little bag of sugar cookies that tasted like home.

Since the high school is one of three on the island, it’s student population is large enough (or at least was at one time) to warrant a rather large gymnasium.  That building was chock full of stairs, mostly filled with students watching the dance performances going on when we moseyed on over to there.

Later, the band came on and performed a medley of songs from various Studio Ghibli films, the famous Japanese animation studio that produced Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and several others lesser known in foreign countries.