Old Folks' Day

The third Monday of September is "Respect for the Aged Day" in Japan. In practical terms, it's generally a celebration of grandparents, and it's pretty common for school kids to do something special for Ba-chan (Grandma) and Ji-chan (Grandpa). Here in Miyazaki most (or perhaps all?) of the elementary schools had the kids draw pictures of their grandparents, and then put them all on display at the local shopping center.

Now, you may be wondering why in hell I'm posting about this now, some three weeks after the fact. Well, it so happens that I took some pictures of the above-mentioned drawings while at the shopping center with my daughter a few weeks back, and I'd forgotten about them until today, while I was trying to capture a shot of the corpse of a giant spider that I found in my office... well, that's another story! They were shot with my cell phone, so they're not up to the usual artistic standards of everything else here (har har). Still, I found the kids' drawings to be colorful and interesting. It was also interesting how drawings from different schools were done using different "techniques" (er, almost as if they came from, um, like, different "schools", if you know what I mean...).

Anyway, here are a few of them (click to enlarge). Oh yeah, let's get Phoctober!