Toyodai Himeji High School : My new school where I have been working since April. About 1400 students! Many come by bike, bus, and train. Even some of the kids ride their bike up to 1 hour each way! Talk about being tough. A couple years back it was an all boys school until recently. There are just a handful of girls, where the boys make up about 80 percent of the school. In a class of 40, there are only about 6 - 8 girls. The school is part of a University in Tokyo called Toyo. Toyo is a pretty big and famous university and it is quite often where the main University school creates a sub high school in its name. Still researching why, because um yeah, Tokyo and Himeji are pretty far apart, and vastly different (3 hours train to Tokyo). But hell the baseball team is quite famous all over Japan. High school baseball is somewhat of a cult status at times, getting to the big game at Koshien Stadium is just like getting to the Super Bowl. Some baseball players from the school will eventually make it pro. Just like "Shiggy" Hasagawa of the Mariners from back in the days. Some of my teachers even taught Shiggy. The school is located in northern Himeji at the base of Mt. Shosha, where they filmed the movie, "The Last Samurai" with Tom Cruise. Kinda cool that you can hike from the back of the school to the top of the mountain in about 40 minutes. The school has a mixed bunch of kids, ranging from the brainy to the not so brainy, to the super sporty. Overall most of the kids are pretty cool and nice, and still the style as the norm for the wannabe cool girls are the short skirts. Which the teacher police always cracks down at times. Honestly I like the longer skirts. Anyways the staff and teachers are pretty cool and friendly too, and school is just a hop skip away from my apartment, so everything is pretty cool so far.
