Filming at Fujisawa high school this time last Friday for Culture Japan.
You've seen what high schools look like in 2D anime and I have always wanted to show you what it looks like in 3D real life. The great folks at Fujisawa High School let us go to film their classes, sporting activities and most importantly the Keion-bu (after school music activities) which was just like the anime - live action K-ON!
The whole experience at Fujisawa was fascinating - I kept pointing at things saying "its just like anime!"
The visit to Fujisawa really made me want to go back to school ^^; I sat in a few of the lessons and wish I could have participated as a student instead. In many of the lessons, I saw the teachers encouraging the students to participate in discussion and interact with each other. From what I observed, the students are extremely diligent, creative and enjoy working in groups.
Saw many examples of teamwork being exercised through the baseball activities. While filming on the pitch I kept thinking about the anime series Touch.
Uploaded the wallpaper for this to Flickr.
With the keion 3rd year students who are about to do some practicing.
The after school activities (Bukatsu) are non compulsory (for most schools) but most of the students attend and practice. If I was a student now I'd probably go for computing, badminton or piano.
Are after school club activities existent in your kingdom? If so what do they offer and what did you take?
I was highly impressed at how diligent the students were at what they were studying and am slightly confused why some foreigners in Japan refuse to let their children go to a Japanese school. I even know folks who left Japan after they had kids because they didn't like the thought of their children going through Japanese education. How would you rate the quality of school education in your kingdom?
Filming at the school entrance. We took a few hours of film enough to make a whole documentary but can only fit in about 7 mins for the Japanese broadcast edition of Culture:Japan which is only a 30 min show. The Animax version of Culture:Japan will be an hour and feature about 20 mins of Fujisawa school coverage.
Lost n found box. I love how Japanese society is (generally) so organized.
I left a new phone on a train once and let a member of staff at the station know. They asked me which train/carriage. They managed to figure out where the train was and arranged for a member of staff to fetch my phone for me. Needless to say I was highly impressed.
The vice principal was the chap who supervised the filming.
Getting a high school to let us film on their grounds required jumping through barbed wire flaming hoops - we nearly got the go ahead to film the school that Lucky Star was based on but got turned down right at the end ^^;
The approval process to film at a school is lengthy and involves parents committees and wot not.
It has however always been a goal of mine to show you something like this and I've always been asking for the possibility to film at a high school for the past few years and am extremely pleased to be able to bring you the piece.
Obstacles exist to be overcome. Obstacles exist to be in the path to a destination.
One of the questions you wanted me to ask the students was "what anime do you watch" and I made sure to ask as many as I could.
The top answers are in this order:-
1.Naruto
2.One Piece
3.Conan
Many of them didn't even know about Haruhi or Keion. But the main reason is that titles like Keion are shown at the early hours of the morning - that's when these students are sleeping. Naruto, One Piece and Conan are shown at prime time regular hours when these students are likely to be home watching. Most of these students don't dabble with torrents or wot not either.
And as you have seen in anime and manga - students eat their lunch in class. Parents typically make bento lunch boxes for their kids to eat in the 40 mins that they have for their lunch time. Our student makes us a gorgeous bento - you can see what it looks like on the show ^^
One of these students wants to work in organizing weddings, one wants to do volunteer work and visit the UK and one wants to work in the medical field.
Computer classes. Our student is studying some visual basic. I ask her why students have three monitors each. She explains how one of the monitor shows instructions from the teacher and that the other monitor (attached to another machine) is a backup for when her current Windows machine freezes. I ask if it freezes often and she says yes @.@
Why do some school uniform figma's come with two sets of shoes? Because students leave their outdoor shoes at the entrance and change into their indoor shoes. Indoor shoes are called "Uwabaki" .
Fujisawa school however does not enforce uwabaki anymore but students still need to have different shoes depending on the classes they are taking like PE indoors/outdoors.
Studying during ones Summer break means that you keep in tip top shape. These booklets contain Summer course info for students. The booklet on the right says on the cover:-
You have the ability to not loose to anyoneWhile I speak Japanese fluently, my translating ability is lousy which is a good and bad thing. Its good because it means I don't need to think in English before converting it into Japanese and also means that I can learn new Japanese words from Japanese.
The downer is that my work is increasingly requiring me to be able to fluently translate between English and Japanese.