New School Year, Hanami and Film Festival

The new school year has just started in Japan. April is generally a stressful time for many workers and especially teachers as it’s the end of the fiscal year. For teachers and some company workers, it also means transfer time. This year only a few of my teachers left at Junior High School, but my really nice vice-principal at Junior High School and two principals at Elementary school got transferred. The three were my favourite principals out of the twelve I work with, so I was really sad to see them go. (Picture Below: Cherry Blossoms blooming at the top of Onomichi)

I also had two new English teachers come to my Junior High and the one I’ll be teaching the third graders with is amazing. She is friendly and appears to motivate the students to learn English. I look forward to working with her the last few months I’ll be here. (Picture Below: Statue at the park in Onomichi with free rice balls)

During the start of the school year, there are also lots of ceremonies to attend. I’ve been to about 8 the past 3 weeks. Both my elementary and Junior High School graduations and entrance ceremonies, as well as farewell ceremonies for leaving teachers and welcoming ceremonies for new teachers.

April also signals the start of spring and Cherry Blossom season. This past Saturday, I met up with some visiting friends from Kyushu and had a great time in Hiroshima. On Sunday, Asuka and I went to this little port town about an hour from my town called Onomichi.

Onomichi is famous for its poets and is also chosen as one of the top 100 places to view Cherry Blossoms in Japan. Asuka and I had a nice picnic below the Cherry Blossom trees and spent the day walking around the narrow side streets of Onomichi. (Picture Below: Outside a cafe in Onomichi)

We were able to snap lots of really good pictures and visit a few temples along our hike up to the top the hill where the Cherry Blossoms were. (Picture Below: At the Fukuyama Film Festival)

The rest of my time the past few weeks have been spent preparing for our film festival entry. The JET’s in a neighbouring city organized a film festival and Rob, Masato and I have been trying to finish up our film. We’ve had to re-shoot our footage a few times due to some camera problems, but we just managed to get the film finished.

Unfortunately, we didn’t win since we had to change to pacing of the film to get under the five minutes time limit. I’m going to try and edit the film and I’ll probably post it up sometime in June. The film is basically about Anpanman, a children’s cartoon character here in Japan and we basically shatter his innocence. It was a blast to make and we hope to have a film screening in a bar sometime in June.

Rob, Asuka and I also decided to celebrate the finishing of the film the night before the festival, so we went to one of my favourite Izakaya’s and had a few bottles of sake.. But the Warm Sake really did Rob in as he was singing and dancing his way back to the station. As well as hassling vehicles and people on the train.

Japanese Factoid #46- Well continuing off my last post about love hotels- I managed to actually visit one. Asuka and I had our 4 Year anniversary this April and after a nice meal in town and a visit to a bar, we made our way to the Love Hotel District. In Hiroshima, the love hotels are all situated on near a river and at night they all light up.

We walked around and settled on a room with a Samurai Decor. So everything is done discreetly, you first pick your room from a lit board and then pay through a little slot. The room was pretty neat as it had a traditional Japanese room feel to it, with clan crests on the walls.