Graduation

Apologies for the sudden halt in my near-clockwork production of entries...the weekend was rather heavy...


Friday saw the graduation of every third year Junior High School student in Kawasaki. Naturally, it was a solemn, stately affair, with all and sundry looking very smart indeed. Pictured is one of the music teachers at Watarida (whose name I haven't heard slowly enough to pronounce yet), wearing a variation of a kimono, traditionally worn by teachers on such days. Everybody in fact looked like they were on their way to an incredibly posh party.

There's Takashima sensei looking dapper. Be-suited dignitaries filled the Koucho senseis' (Principals') room, looking important and drinking cherry blossom tea (don't be deceived by this stuff - it may sound and even look like the most refreshing thing on the planet, what with the delicate pink flower gracefully floating in a cup of clear liquid, but the taste is akin to drinking the ocean), and excited parents filed into the gym, usually bare, now bedecked.


Triumphant marches blared out of the tannoy, whilst the third year Home Room Teachers proudly led their students before the stage, a flower in every lapel. Following rousing renditions of the Japanese National Anthem and the school anthem, the arduous process of presenting one-hundred-and-seventy students with their certificates began.

Once that was out of the way, the Koucho sensei launched into his speech...

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...the Principals' piece presented, he gave the floor to the students. Up came the student deemed eloquent enough to deliver the farewell speech. That's when the sniffing began. First it was a mere hint of sorrow, a momentary lapse in the speakers concentration that brings emotion to the surface. As he went on, there were several responses from the third year students. Another rendition of the school anthem, this time with the third years facing the rest of the school. More sniffling, the odd choked sob. Then the music teacher begins playing a slow, nostalgic slice of plinkery on the grand piano, whilst the third years take their places in front of the stage. Then another couple of speakers take the mike, fighting their way through the speech midst tears and gagging. Then a ballad. More tears, now some of the girls are openly weeping. The continuity of freshly ironed uniforms is interrupted by pink handkerchiefs...

...please God, not another ballad...

...now the Home Room teachers and most of the boys are crying. I'm surprised at the characters now red in the face with tears - the hard, chunky, sporty fellows who laugh in the face of despair, and guffaw their way through wedgies perpetrated against the emotionally fragile...the last thing anyone needs now is another ballad...ah...


The finale - everybody leaves the hall, and the parents line up in the corridors to witness the final exit of the third years. One girl, still crying, flings herself on me in a very un-Japanese frenzy of hugs and tears...then the dust settles. I can't help but compare it to my own "graduation", with its swift speech in the chapel, cold pizza in the hall and tales of my friends stealing furtive gropes in the Valley Centertainment Industrial Estate (home to that bastion of a tasteful saturday night, Atlantis).

Straight after the event, I imagined that only those with a heart of stone could fail to be moved by such a sight...then again, the spectacle of miserable teenagers is more common than I tend to remember...