So graduation is over. It was a really weird experience, because the kids in my school don't really graduate. At the other, public schools I worked in before I came to this one, graduation was a big deal that seemed to last for days, with crying and speeches and yearbook signing and all the stuff that you would expect from a high school graduation. In Japan compulsory education ends after junior high, so the students go their separate ways after that, although they seem to maintain their junior high friendships for life. They even have junior high reunions in Japan, with their old teachers and everything. Having to apply and compete for spots in high school really seems to put some pressure on the kids to grow up, arguably too early. Some of them even have to accept the fact that their not cut out for an educated life and get a job at the construction site instead of going to high school.

But none of that happens in my school. The school is a six year course encompassing junior high and high school. Passing the junior high entrance exam automatically earns you a free ticket into the (admittedly mediocre) high school. So there is no real entrance exam pressure, and after graduation the kids just move downstairs and start calling themselves high school students. A few of the highest level kids take exams and get into higher ranked high schools, but most of them just continue on like nothing happened. So the graduation was a really weird experience, because it didn't have that "spreading your seeds to the four winds" feeling to it. There was all the same sappy singing and speeches and photo-taking of normal graduations, but it didn't carry the same emotional impact at all for me.