Back to School (I)

In the past week, I've been on interesting visits to both an elementary school and a high school. They were certainly pretty unlike the English educational experience, or my knowledge of it anyway...

I visited the elementary school with a group of foreign exchange students who are currently on their year out at Hosei University here in Tokyo. The school buildings themselves seemed huge, and apparently all of the schools are centrally funded and are supposed to have the same facilities (including a swimming pool!) My surprise at the size of the school (a far cry from Chesham Bois C. of E. Combined...) was a mystery to Holly, a student from Baylor Baptist University in Texas. Apparently, her elementary school was even larger, and her high school had 5,000 pupils.

We watched their annual cultural festival, which involved all of the members of each class putting on a performance of some kind. The costumes were pretty impressive (and unsurprisingly cute) and all the kids seemed to know their lines perfectly (even the second graders). It was a useful demonstration of the level of my Japanese - I understood pretty much all of the Second Grade play (about a king who loved cake but didn't brush his teeth) and some of the Fourth Grade one. However, the Sixth Grade one went right over my head!

Oh, and all of the plays seemed to be set in some kind of weird European fairytale land - like our fairytales I suppose...