Komei School for the Physically Handicapped
The school festival, field day, and other big days students look forward to

Special Events

Every fall, the students at Komei participate in the Komei Festival, where they demonstrate what they have learned in school. This year the students put on plays, sang songs and danced, exhibited their artwork around the school, and even ran a store selling candy. Come look at what the students did during this school festival.
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Performing Onstage at the Komei Festival

Every year for two days during November the school puts on an event called the Komei Festival, which is an opportunity for students to show off what they have learned through plays and exhibitions. The Komei Festival for 2002 marked the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the school, so along with students, teachers, and parents, many former graduates of Komei attended. With all of the people there, the atmosphere was quite exciting.

The main attractions at the festival are the plays and music performed on the stage in the gymnasium. On the first day of the festival, November 1, six groups of elementary-school students and another six groups of middle-school students each gave a 15-minute performance in which they sang songs and played musical instruments. High school students performed plays on the following day. Teachers created scripts based on themes put forward by the students, and the characters in the stories were modeled on the personalities of the student-actors who played them.

 
Students are busy preparing for a play.  

Tomoyuki Abe prepares for his role as the father in Mary Poppins.

Teachers learn the lines, too, and help the students.
A group of first-year high school students performed the classic Mary Poppins. Student Yukio Nakamura says of the experience, "We practiced a lot, so I wasn't really nervous. Actually, it was fun." The play featured a number of musical and dance scenes, and Yukio showed off his skill at tap dancing. "I'm not good at singing," says Tomoyuki Abe, who wore a mustache and a bowtie as he played the role of the father, "so I worked hard to get my lines right." The students rehearsed almost every day during the month prior to the festival.
 
Yukio Nakamura tap dances onstage. The students are all in costume appropriate for being in an ancient desert.
The narrator also plays an important role in telling the story.

Second-year high school students performed an original play titled Time Traveler: The Ambition of Okachan the Great, with popular student Fumio Okada cast as the villain Okachan. Sachie Shima, who played a high school student in the drama, summarizes the plot: "Some high school students build a time machine, and they travel to a desert in the distant past. When they come across a small village, that's where they find Okachan the Great, who monopolizes the precious water resources." It's a fun story, and it also features a romance between a girl in the village and one of the high school students. Atsushi Kikukawa, who played the lead role of a high school student in the play, expresses the confidence he felt before the performance, saying, "The theme was something decided on by everybody. While remembering the lines was a lot of work, I was okay because I took part in another play last year."
 

 

The finale was a 50-minute version of The Lion King performed by third-year high school students. Shinya Ishizuka, who played the role of Scar, explains his feeling before the performance, "I've been attending Komei since elementary school, and this is my twelfth festival. Going onstage is always nerve-wracking, but since I'm taking part in the finale this year, it's even more so. I couldn't sleep well last night, but I had a dream that I was performing onstage. I woke up in the middle of it, so I wonder how the rest of my performance will turn out when I'm actually onstage."

The passion of the students was evident in their performances onstage, and when the plays came to an end, proud looks could be seen on their faces as the audience showered them with applause.









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