Motomachi High School

I have never seen a school like this one. The principal told us that usually in Japan if there was this much open space, someone would have wanted to put in a parking lot. That, of course, made me hum Joni Mitchell to myself -- “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. Pave paradise, put up a parking lot.”
There are high ceilings, glass skylights, and escalator since the four stories are so high, and even a skywalk to the most amazing art wing imaginable. They were prepared for our visit. We were scheduled for calligraphy claas and each assigned to a student who taught us to write whatever we wanted to try in Japanese. After that we watched an expert bamboo flutist, who demonstrated on a 1,000-year-old instrument. After that he passed out flutes he’d made out of plastic pipe to all the students and to all of us. After we tried valiantly, some with more success than me, to coax out a tolerable squawk, we were given the flutes to take home. I also observed an English class, which was co-taught by a Japanese teacher and an American one. They did a scavenger hunt to practice Halloween vocabulary, then watched Charlie Brown’s the Great Pumpkin to look for the same words. I had less luck watching a World History teacher lecture about Chinese history. Our interpreter was in the room part of the time and she couldn’t translate. Luckily, there was a soccer game going on out the window. The teacher seemed to be a good lecturer, but by the end of the class, six students were asleep on their desks.
Tomorrow morning our host families pick us up for an overnight visit -- 10:00 a.m.Saturday to 4:00 p.m. Sunday. If they don’t speak any English, it may be a long visit. Sunday all 16 of us are staying all night at a Japanese Inn or ryokan. That should be an experience, too. We travel back to Tokyo on Monday. I won’t have access to the internet for several days, so this will be the last entry until next week.