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setting the scene: a college festival in Japan

By J. L. Bastiat ⋅ May 16, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Our gracious host has been after me to do a Japan post for a while, but I keep getting bogged down in cultural criticism and other topics that must be making y’all crazy. Even trebuchets probably don’t entirely ease your pain.

Let’s see what we can do about that, shall we?  If possible, I’ll do several posts about Japan in the next little while. For now, let me give you some photographic scene-setting.

I’m showing you a college festival for a fairly simple reason:  the first thing you should get used to about Japan is fusion.  Almost any way you try to analyze the experience of being a foreigner in Japan (and in Japan, you will definitely experience being an alien!) will fall flat on its face if you begin from “modern Japan” or “traditional Japan.”  The Japanese cultural genius, malady, and mystery is relentless fusion; a marvelous curiosity about the foreign, an intense need to label it as foreign, and a surprising way of turning foreign elements into “Japanese culture” before you know it.

So, let’s take a brief walk around, shall we?

The festival at my university in Japan, aptly nicknamed the “Festa,” was one of the major events of the year–as indeed similar festivals at nearly every high school and college are.  Aside from a morale-boosting period, club fund-raiser, and community showcase, it also provided an outlet for both modern and traditional energies which did not fit the more staid confines of the commencement ceremonies, concerts, chapels, and other major occasions.  There were times more dedicated to recruitment, but this was definitely recruitment time.  Perhaps most important, this was the time clubs prepared for; and clubs, more than classes, are the essential components of Japanese college education.

(Or so it seemed.  Japanese students have nothing but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” for high school, and can look forward to on-the-job classes for the education they will actually use, so college is . . . an equivocal blessing.  We’re working on it, OK?)

On with the tour.

Take a look at the fellow here.  A brief conversation revealed he had spent a fair bit of time in the States, and had a friend-of-a-cousin relationship to a student in a club, who had arranged him to bring his traveling festival rummage sale / souvenir / T-shirt / kitzsch stand to the university.  In a nation where no one really flies the Japanese flag unless it’s really official (the official stance is that nationalism is really dangerous–and, frankly, do we not understand that?), I laughed out loud to see both a US flag and a Confederate Jack displayed.  I love the irony, love it a lot.  (I did not put up the snapshot of me laughing with the Jack in the background, to avoid being immortalized in a career-unfriendly way.)

I have lots more.  I’ll save some for later, though.  Nihon Yokoso!

Tags: Japan