From Friday to Tuesday I don’t have any classes thanks
to a university festival, daigaku-sai, that’s happening at this time. Well,
Friday and Tuesday are for setting up and cleaning up, the festival itself is
from Saturday (today) til Monday, but I’m not gonna complain that they’re
giving me time off.
If I am to be completely honest, I don’t know what to
really think. I went there with two friends and we manage to see it all in a
surprisingly short amount of time. In some way the daigaku-sai seems a bit like
a Freshers’ Fair: no classes, student societies are advertising and on top of
that you have all sorts of events, concerts, performances etc. But unlike a
Freshers’ Fair in Kanazawa there are a
lot let societies, and during the festival they were more about showing
what they’re on about (exhibitions, presentations, game rooms, whatever they
could think of) than recruiting and getting some fresh blood to join. Moreover,
there was a lot more of all kinds of food stalls and cafes set up especially
for the festival, which in turn make the festival look a little bit more like a
Sunday fair, while I imagine most Freshers’ Fair are similar to the Oxford one
in that you get hardly any food, but when you do, it’s free samples etc (Oxford
usually has Dominos Pizza).
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| Manga cafe - drink and/or eat while reading manga. |
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| TV games (mainly cute Tetris) |
What’s even more interesting is that although students
definitely fordem the majority, I saw a lot of adults with kids and elderly
people. Not sure if they’re in any way associated with the university (dunno,
through relatives/friends who study/work here or whatever), some looked like
they came to the festival simply because there was one. Quite interesting and I’d
say that it made the event seem a bit more family friendly (though I probably
wouldn’t go as far as to say that Freshers’ Fairs aren’t family friendly, they’re
just not intended for families).
But the main difference were… questionnaires. By the
exit of each room, be it an exhibition, a demonstration, or even game rooms, the
organisers asked to fill up the questionnaire and share your opinion. Sometimes
you could even get something for that, for example for doing the questionnaire
about an exhibition of works by members of CASる (Comics, Anime,
Science-Fiction) society you got three postcards of your choice, all of which
were miniatures of the pictures you just saw at the exhibit. But while I can
understand the point of a questionnaire after some performances, like the
magicians, for example (he was mainly doing card tricks – still enjoyed it lots
though!), I’m not so sure about things like the games room etc. Maybe it’s just
another one of those Japanese ways of doing things.
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| Made entirely out of papier-mâché! |
And, to our surprise, that was it. The festival’s
supposed to be on from 10am to 5pm every day this weekend, and yet we managed
to explore it quite thoroughly within about an hour. According to the schedule
it’s supposed to be the same things every day, with some changes as to the
concerts, so if someone doesn’t feel the need to go there for lunch coz they
can’t be bothered to cook themselves, a one-off seems just fine.
As I said, I am not sure myself what to think about
it. Probably the more I compare the daigaku-sai with the Freshers’ Fair, the
more I think that the Japanese simply have their own way of doing events like
that and have different priorities. I definitely don’t regret going, I had a
lovely time viewing all the exhibits or listening to better and worse student/Indie
bands from the distance. But at the end of the day I think I still prefer the
incredible variety of societies that I can get at a Freshers’ Fair.
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