It's a festivus for the rest of us.

Much has happened since I last checked in. Much can happen in a Yamanashi minute.

Let's begin with Friday's school festival at Norin.

Classes were shortened each day for the past few weeks so that the students could have time to prepare. There was dancing, there was singing, and there was this:


If the picture itself does not cause a kya, kya, kya (that's how Japanese laughter is written), I will divulge a few facts. The man chasing the chicken looks EXACTLY as he does in real life. The man chasing the chicken just happens to teach farming techniques, for Norin is an agricultural school. The egg being chased by the chicken also looks EXACTLY like the teacher it portrays. Ya know, if that teacher just happened to be an egg. (This would be the perfect spot for a joke relating interoffice dynamics to the chicken-or-egg-first paradigm, but I don't really know which came first.) I do know that many more of these paintings were made, and many more of them were brilliant slash risque.


Look, the steering wheel is on the right side of the car! That is so cragy! What next? Portable telephones?

There were a few other paintings that I wanted to photograph, but an entire classroom exploded with "Kevin sensei! No!!!" when I aimed my camera. I think the artist was a tad embarrassed of the drawing, or maybe it was fear of the Patriot Act.

For the singing and dancing portion of the festival, all the students gathered in the gym. Over the course of three hours, there was karaoke and choreography. There were three songs total that I could understand. The first was Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend," the second was Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend," and the third was Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend." To be fair, the third time it was actually scoring a movie showing students doing Tae Bo. Actually, that's not fair at all.

Speaking of movies, this was one day I wish I owned a digital camcorder. I'm pretty sure I witnessed the greatest air guitar performance of all time in the whole entire Earth planet. It was done by a teacher. He did backflips, leg kicks, played with his teeth, played over his head, fell all over the stage, played dead, resurrected himself, played alive, removed clothing and moved clothing around. This lasted for roughly ten minutes, and when it ended, the applause was lackluster. It was one of those Truman show moments where you look around and start yelling. Did anyone else just see that?! You rub your eyes. There are world championships for this sort of thing, and the greatest would-be champion to ever pick up an air guitar is giving the performance of his life on the small stage of an agricultural and horticultural high school in a small Japanese suburb of the prefecture's capital that's two hours outside of Tokyo. In the arrested words of Gob Bluth, "C'mon!"

At lunch time, they opened the school courtyard to allow students to sell some of their food creations. (They teach "Food Science" at Norin.) During the foodcourt smorgasbord, a band played Japanese punk-rock covers. I can't say with absolute certainty that they were covers, but the lead singer had trouble hitting all the high notes.

Next, there was this guy on the left:

Notice the towel in his back pocket. Notice the backward-turned, flat-billed, Yankees cap. Notice the Timberland shirt. He was... a really good rapper. He didn't quite carry the crowd, but this is the same crowd that yawned while the greatest air guitarist in the world left his heart on that stage. C'mon! My favorite part was when he freestyled: Japanese, Japanese, Japanese, "party people," Japanese, Japanese, Japanese, "motha fucka," Japanese, Japanese, Japanese, "West side. East side. South side. North side." I can only assume he was talking about Kyushu, Honshu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido, respectively.