Fire Festival + first day of school+ computer crash

Time to catch everyone up to speed on the last 5 days or so!

This weekend was the Fujiyoshida fire festival. They claim it’s one of the three biggest festivals in Japan, but you here that for just about everything here. It was a big day for us because a lot of our JET friends were going to make the rare trip down to Fujiyoshida to see the town and the fire festival, so for once it wouldn’t be just Phil and me hanging around by ourselves.

Here’s a brief rundown on the fire festival. About an hour before sunset a group of drunks take the portable shrines from the Sengen Jinja temple down into the main part of town. The shrines are very heavy, so it’s really quite a task when you combine it with the drunkenness. They also stop to take many beer breaks on the way down. This gives everyone a good chance to take their picture on front of the shrines (one’s a big fancy gold one, the other is a strange looking orange Mt. Fuji number). Once the drunken procession makes it all the way down then it’s time to start the real festivities!

Fujiyoshida has on large main road called Hancho Dori that runs from the main part of town up to the Sengen Jinja. This street is closed off to traffic for the fire festival and street vendors set up booths where they have little games for the kids and they sell a large selection of festival foods (I had okonamiyaki which is essentially a kind of Japanese omlet). Once the shrines are in place and the sun has gone down, several bonfires and pyres are lit in the middle of Hancho Dori. They really don’t seem that impressive by themselves, the coolness comes when you look down the street and all you can see is a line of fire that goes for miles. They are also a real safety hazard as there is nothing separating the people from the fire. The bonfires and pyres also tend to collapse as they burn. I personally don’t feel that it’s really a fire festival until somebody is seriously injured.

Anyways, we all just walked up and down Hancho Dori while getting stuffed on festival and drunk off of overpriced beer. After the festival was over, we all headed back to our apartment complex and had a little after-party until our guests fell asleep on our floor (thankfully there was no puking). The next day a couple of them stayed and we have them the big tour of the town, including going to our favorite sushi place.

That was Phil and mine’s last week without having to work. School started on Monday of this week. The first day was only a half day for the kids. It basically consisted of an assembly, uniform checks and the students getting yelled at by a former sumo wrestler (I’ll explain later). I was the guest of honor at the assembly so I had to make a speech introducing myself to the school. Since I’m not really into public speaking and I assumed that 99% of what I said would not be understood by anybody I decided to just give a brief (I’m happy to be here, Japan is different, nice to meet you, etc) speech that only lasted about one minute. I just went up on the stage, spit it our real quick and sat back down.

My speech caused quite the ado among the faculty. It wasn’t that I said anything wrong, in fact, nobody but the English teachers had any idea what I said. Rather, the faculty was very upset that a few of the students were goofing off during my short speech and not paying attention. The caused the students to endure not one but two yelling sessions administered by the PE teacher who used to be a sumo wrestler. First he yelled at the entire school for about 15 minutes. Afterwards he separated out a group of about 30-40 kids and just yelled at them for about 20 minutes. I talked to a few of the trouble making kids right after the shouting lesson. I have no idea what they said, but I was assuming that they kept asking for my penis size or something similar because they kept laughing as they asked.

As I was writing this blog entry at school my computer crashed. It turned out that some of my memory broke so I went two days without a computer (it was awful, I wasn’t sure if I was going to survive!) Anyways now I don’t feel like finishing this entry, so too bad. Well, maybe I will, later…