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KIDS IN ACTION Graduation Art | |||||||||||
March is when school students graduate in Japan. At many elementary schools, it's a custom for students to band together to create something as a memento of their time at the school. What kinds of projects are these 12-year-old artists working on this year? The sixth-grade students at Makabe Elementary School in Sakuragawa, Ibaraki Prefecture, have drawn pictures - at the bottom of a swimming pool. Used by the school's first and second graders, the pool measures 16 x 16 meters and is 50 centimeters deep. Three sixth-grade classes worked on their own designs, featuring whales, dolphins, and submarines, respectively. With the new decorations completed, the first and second graders will be all the more eager to test the waters when the pool opens in swimming season. At Mino-oka Elementary School, in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture, 61 sixth-grade students have been working on one big picture. It's a mosaic measuring 180 x 90 centimeters and made from 18,000 colored tiles, each a one-centimeter square. The school plans to embed the mosaic into the floor of an observation platform in the schoolyard, from where Kobe's famous cityscape can be viewed. Meanwhile, the students at Kawai Elementary School in Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture, have decided that their graduation project will showcase the local traditional craft of lacquering. Since the Edo Period (1603-1868), the town of Wajima has been famous for its distinctive lacquering technique called Wajimanuri. This is used to make wooden serving dishes coated in lacquer. The dishes are famous for their durability and their decorated patterns, which are drawn using gold. Over the past 25 years, the sixth-grade students at Kawai Elementary have used the same techniques to create "graduation panels" every year. This year, the 52 sixth-grade kids will start their project by making rough sketches on zelkova wood. They then will carve the panels one by one and decorate them using powdered metals, including gold and silver. When that's finished, the panels will be assembled to form one giant image. The 24 works created by previous graduating students decorate such places as the school entrance, the principal's office, and the staff room. With these works placed all over the school, the students have had many chances to admire them right from the day when they entered the school. "The panels were very carefully made, and the colors are beautiful," one student says. Another says, "There are works that moved me, just like the real thing would, and that impresses me." Current students admire the careful construction of the panels and the dedication of the kids who made them.
The theme of this year's work is "New Departures: Wajima." The students chose this to reflect the importance of 2006 for the local community: in February Wajima merged with a neighboring town. Now the students want to convey the spirit of the new town. One student says, "We want to draw the nature of Wajima, including the sea and sky." Another says, "We want to do something good, something that hasn't been done before. It should express the beauty of Wajima." Their panel is scheduled to be completed by early March so that it can be shown off on graduation day on March 16. Theirs will be the twenty-fifth graduation project to decorate the school and its grounds. It'll be fun to see what these enthusiastic kids come up with.
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