End-of-Year GRADUATION

Lots of lessons have been cancelled because students (in all grades) are preparing for graduation. The 2nd and 1sts will help decorate the hall (red and white fabrics stripes all round the walls). Third graders will be taught how to bow/ how long to bow/ when to bow (during the ceremony there is a lot of bowing/ standing up sitting down, and everybody needs to be familiar with the process. There is a lot of bowing to the Japanese flag aswell, and the singing of the national anthem. This made the ceremony itself very formal. Like an English prize giving, but the bowing and to the flag was something different, that added to the formality.

3rd grade female homeroom teachers will wear their kimono for this special occassion. It used to be that mothers did as well, for the graduation ceremony of their child, but in the past 10 years Japan has changed. I saw no mother wearing kimono. In fact the parents were quite casually dressed. A definite change from 10 years ago my supervisor said.

Students seemed very surprised when I told them graduation does not happen in England. Graduation is the biggest and most serious assembly event in the school calendar. (Japanese schools don`t have weekly assemblies like English schools). Although, important, everybody hates it. It is 2 hours long and we all sit in the un-centrally heated (of course) gym hall. The 1st and 2nd graders must also endure this, sitting in rows at the back. Again, typical of Japan for a whole community to have to have this experience together even though this ceremony is totally irrelevant to them.

The end of the school year is a highly emotional time for the 3rd graders and their homeroom teachers who have been with them, so involved in their lives all the way through these past 3 years. The students will be leaving, diverting off, the close, safe community splitting up. So it`s a difficult adjustment to make I guess. Many students cry during the graduation ceremony. The school band play the school song over and over while the students precess in and out with their teachers – it was one of those emotion-inducing songs if you knew it`s significance of being played at every graduation. Some homeroom teachers cry too. The ceremony around this time of year is, in a way, as much for these 3rd grade homeroom teachers who`ve got their students to the end, as it is for the graduating students themselves. They were applauded in the staffroom, they applauded themselves in their separate room, the enkai later that afternoon was in honour of them. During the graduation ceremony itself they were clapped by all. You could just tell – they were elated from their achievement of reaching the end with their students – ready to let them fly off into the world, ready because of their hard and caring work over the 3 years.