No photo available for this one, but I love the tale told to me by one of my students yesterday.
"Nippon Hamu" (Japanese ham - literally, all the teams here have brand names for names, "Yakult" "Softbank" etc.) recently won the Japanese league and are officially the best baseball team in Japan, which is cause for celebration here in Hokkaido, their home prefecture.
The mayor of Sapporo wanted a parade with confetti, to emulate similar parades as seen in New York, but the ministry responsible for keeping the town clean wasn't so keen.
The deal they worked out was this: A paper company donated the required tonnage, and it was cut into 5x5cm squares instead of the usual confetti-sized pieces. This was done so that it'd be easier to clean up after the event.
Apparently no machinery exists for confetti-throwing, and it couldn't be done by hand since most of the buildings are only about ten storeys high, so the staff involved hacked together numerous buckets with short tubes and fans to propel the precisely-cut confetti the requisite distance.
During the event, announcements were made to the effect that cleaning costs would be high after the parade, so if everyone wouldn't mind, could they assist in picking up the confetti and disposing of it in the bags provided?
Apparently everybody, from the youngest kids to the oldest spectators, and "beautiful women and men" participated in the clean up operation.
She told all this to me to illustrate a "beautiful story of everyone working together to achieve a dream", and I don't think she understood why I was laughing so much...
"Nippon Hamu" (Japanese ham - literally, all the teams here have brand names for names, "Yakult" "Softbank" etc.) recently won the Japanese league and are officially the best baseball team in Japan, which is cause for celebration here in Hokkaido, their home prefecture.
The mayor of Sapporo wanted a parade with confetti, to emulate similar parades as seen in New York, but the ministry responsible for keeping the town clean wasn't so keen.
The deal they worked out was this: A paper company donated the required tonnage, and it was cut into 5x5cm squares instead of the usual confetti-sized pieces. This was done so that it'd be easier to clean up after the event.
Apparently no machinery exists for confetti-throwing, and it couldn't be done by hand since most of the buildings are only about ten storeys high, so the staff involved hacked together numerous buckets with short tubes and fans to propel the precisely-cut confetti the requisite distance.
During the event, announcements were made to the effect that cleaning costs would be high after the parade, so if everyone wouldn't mind, could they assist in picking up the confetti and disposing of it in the bags provided?
Apparently everybody, from the youngest kids to the oldest spectators, and "beautiful women and men" participated in the clean up operation.
She told all this to me to illustrate a "beautiful story of everyone working together to achieve a dream", and I don't think she understood why I was laughing so much...
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