LD's Guide to Japan

• The Japanese school year is year round—it begins in April and ends in March—so this month (this week in particular) I’m going to all my schools’ graduation ceremonies.  I attended my junior high’s graduation on Tuesday, and yesterday I went to my elementary school’s.
• One thing that stood out to me right away was that they played music that I, as an American, would normally associate with weddings: Pachalbel’s Canon, etc.  No Pomp and Circumstance or the like.  They did, however, sing that Japanese version of Auld Lang Syne at my JHS’s ceremony.
• As one of my colleagues told me, “Graduation is the most important event of the year for schools, so we take it very seriously.”  And she wasn’t exaggerating—the whole ceremony is incredibly serious.  Lively is definitely not a word I would use to describe it; it’s very structured, ritualized, slow, and completely somber.  Out of the 158 students graduating from my JHS, I saw only 2 show ANY kind of emotion at all: one smiled, and one cried (during the ceremony, that is—there was more crying afterwards).  Everyone else was completely rigid and straight-faced through the entire ceremony.
• My ES’s graduation was only slightly more lighthearted—due to the facts, I assume, that 1) it’s an elementary school, so they get to have a bit more fun with it, and 2) my ES happens to be tiny (only 12 kids in the graduating class), so that also allows them a certain flexibility in the ceremony.
• There are no caps and gowns; the students wear their school uniforms.  I don’t teach high school, so I’m not entirely sure if it’s the same, but I would bet that it is.  I am told that at some college graduations the students wear kimonos.
• There are several speeches given: one from the principal, one from the head of the PTA, one from someone from city hall, one from the outgoing student body president, and one from the future student body president, and maybe even some others.  Everyone’s speeches are written vertically, from right to left, on a scroll of paper that is folded like an accordian.  They hold it with both hands as they read the speech and unfold it little by little as the speech progresses.  That was one of my favorite things—as far as presentation goes, it looks way cooler than holding note cards.  The speeches, though, are also very serious—no jokes are made—and the content of each is almost EXACTLY the same.  There is honestly little to no difference between any of the speeches.
• You have to bow at least 50 times during a graduation ceremony.  No exaggeration.
• The only lighthearted and sorta ‘fun’ part of graduation comes after the actual ceremony, when everyone gathers outside for the “miokuri,” or sending-off, in which all the students and teachers line up to make an aisle for the graduating students to walk through as they leave school for the last time.  The graduating students also each carry a flower that they give to a teacher or an underclassman as a thank you for helping him/her thus far.  I never actually taught the graduating class at my JHS, so I didn’t get any flowers there, but two of the twelve graduating from my ES gave me a flower, so that made me very happy.

The song Auld Lang Syne does exist in Japan, but somewhere along the way someone made all new Japanese lyrics for it and changed the title to 蛍の光, or The Firefly’s Glow.  The general theme of the song is still the same—this sort of mix of nostalgia and hope for things to come—but it’s not a New Year’s song here.  It’s instead a song that a lot of stores play on their PA systems 10 or 15 minutes before closing time, to let you know that you need to get your ass in gear.