University Festival (Post #1)
Here’s a short series of portraits I took today. If anyone objects to having their picture shown on this Web site, please let me know and I’ll remove it.
More pictures soon.
Comments
Well, I wanted to visit the festival! How was it? Did students earn much selling noodles?
Ruedi-sensei, thank you for taking so many pictures! Since I didn’t take any pictures of the school festival, I enjoy them very much.
At first, I was going to the school festival on either of two days, but I actually did go on both days. The weather was fine and many people visited. I enjoyed both selling noodles and buying foods which the other groups sold. I don’t know the exact amount of money our group earned, but heard that we sold more servings of noodles than last year. I enjoyed the festival very much!
> thank you for taking so many pictures!
No problem. Thanks to Hayase-sensei, actually, who can be trusted to put in a weekend shift here at the Department and who provided me with some extra image processing equipment after my own broke down.
They weren’t only selling noodles. The Engl. Dept. freshmen had a stall where they sold sandwiches (yup, that’s “sandwich” in English; in the rest of the world nobody knows what sando means) and freshly made mini-castella cakes. Others helped out at the ESS stall, and the non-freshmen (including a few former students) were selling noodles at a stall of their own.
I’d be curious to learn how much money they made, too. Sharp comments on economic matters aren’t usually my forte, but let me hazard a guess anyway: if every student had simply contributed the money they earn from their part-time jobs in half the time they spent working for or at the stalls, the net proceeds would have been four times as high. Nothing against running a stall at a university fest, however; I just can’t imagine it’s a hugely profitable effort. What still makes it a great thing, I’d say, is the experience and the joy of doing a project like this together.
On Sunday, I met David Stringer, a British linguist who teaches at the Faculty of Humanities. He said he couldn’t imagine anything like this happening at an English university, where none of the students could be bothered to work at a stall: they’d just be happy to meet up and get drunk.
That’s not quite my experience. At my university, we used to do something rather similar, except that it lasted for just one night and went on really, really late. Or early, I should say, like four o’clock in the morning. The individual departments and whatever groups all made their own contributions, such as — oh well, the English Department did a pub with poetry readings — Guinness and poetry readings, like, you know, are a potent mixture. Very potent potent mixture. Like. Where was I.
Yes. I remember I contributed a big plywood pub sign once that read “The Bard’s Head” and sported a big colourful portrait of Shakespeare. It went to the highest bidder for a ridiculously low price at two o’clock in the morning. The guy who bought it was highly apologetic about the price: he said, “We Canadians are cheap” — or maybe he said, “We Australians are cheap,” I really don’t remember because it was two o’clock in the morning and, y’know, Guinness and stuff.
I’ve just discovered that there are two big photo collections available online from the last big bash back in June: one, two. Looks like somebody was having fun.
The thing that surprised me about the Festival here in Japan, though, was the trash management: the garbage cans on campus were all organised into units of eight or nine and collected eight or nine different types of garbage. Each of those units had a Festival Staff member (or two) who educated visitors on where exactly everything went: you had to prise the pesky polypropylene coating from your styrofoam noodle cup and bin them separately. Having each of those garbage can units staffed with its own instructor (or two) probably would be unthinkable outside a country that values patience as a national virtue.
And then there was the final act on the big stage on Sunday evening, which drew a very big crowd, and I totally didn’t get it: they were a bunch of guys in orange overalls who could neither sing nor dance and whose act basically consisted in jumping up and down, waving their arms, belting brain-dead lyrics to mind-numbing techno-beats and performing ridiculous stunts that would have gone over well, I imagine, at a kindergarten party. Yet the crowd was enthusiastic. Maybe there was an element of humour that I didn’t understand: if so, I’d appreciate if somebody could explain it to me.
Kevin :: November 4, 2003
In America we would work at the stalls *and* get drunk. No rule against that I think.
Wrong again. Section 3 of the Honor Code explicitly lists “Selling noodles under the influence” as an instance of academic misconduct.
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I’ve just added another six pictures to this gallery. The navigation, I’m afraid, continues to be entirely linear: you’ll have to click from one image to the next until I’ll manage to install some software that will take the pain out of creating thumbnails. Meanwhile, here’s a series of shortcuts to the pictures by name: Daijirou | Shohta | Masami | Ayumi Sawa | Tatsuya and Kazuma | Yukiko | Aya | Akinori | Yuh | Chie | Yukari | Mami and Ayumi | Kuniyuki | Kenta | Riyohei | Hidetaka | Jun | Kazuya | Shingo and Kuniyuki | Toshiki
Also, here’s another picture of Hidetaka and another of Masami.
As a photographer, I’m neither methodical nor sophisticated, and the shots I take are fairly haphazard: some of them work, others don’t — well, most of them don’t, actually, so if I did take your picture and it doesn’t show up in this gallery, please assume that it wasn’t particularly good. Nothing personal.
One young lady didn’t like the idea of having her picture posted to the Web. She had some interesting footwear, though.