Bunkasai, or Japanese school festivals, are a huge annual event for many students in middle school and high school, and students often prepare months in advance to decorate their classrooms, rehearse for drama performances, or create an extravagant display that showcases their creativity and diligence.

For the junior high schoolers at Natori Daiichi Middle School in Miyagi Prefecture, one of the main features of their yearly school festival was a handmade cardboard replica of a Mobile Suit Gundam. This year, however, the students decided to do something different, and ended up making an extremely detailed, life-sized Boeing 737 engine out of cardboard boxes.

Accurate down to the millimeter, the cardboard plane engine made headlines after visitors gazed in amazement at the culmination of the students’ meticulous efforts. Though we would have imagined it to take months to complete, the cardboard engine was finished in just over a month by the hands of 22 students in the school’s art club, and was measured at 1.2 meters in diameter and 3.6 meters long.

The students told Asahi Shinbun that the engine was created with over 50 large cardboard pieces, and was built with over 100 individual parts. While it was on display during the school festival on September 10th, the engine might make its way over to Sendai Airport to be displayed there in the future.


By - grape Japan editorial staff.