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Monday was Culture Day here in Japan, and workers and students across the country enjoyed a well-earned day off from their daily routines. During the three-day weekend, it’s common for schools to hold Culture Festivals, at which art clubs display their works, music classes hold recitals, and drama departments screen movies or create walk-through haunted houses. The events are usually open to the public, and let schools show off their students’ creativity to the local community.

The Culture Festival at Komaba High School, located in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward, even includes a Miss Komaba High beauty contest. We suppose that now is as good a time as any to inform you that Komaba High is not co-ed, and that the pageant’s carefully-coifed and femininely attired contestants are in fact all dudes.

Since its founding in 1950, Komaba High has built a name for itself as a respected prep school. The school is affiliated with Tsukuba University, the institute of higher learning in Ibaraki Prefecture known as one of Japan’s top technology-focused colleges. Komaba High has been officially designated by the Ministry of Education as a “super science high school,” and a large number of its pupils each year are accepted to prestigious Tokyo University.

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Several of Komaba High’s extracurricular activities are what you’d imagine when you put a large number of intellectuals together. The school has a club for players of the traditional Japanese strategy game go, and often sends representatives to national competitions. In 2005, a team from Komaba High took home first prize in a supercomputer programming contest.

At the same time, some of Komaba High’s campus life gels with what you’d expect from a group of boys whose hormones are all raging away spending several hours a day surrounded by nothing but other members of the Y-chromosome club. Lacking any actual girls, but still seeing the annual Culture Festival as excuse enough to have a Miss Komaba contest, the guys of Komaba High have taken it upon themselves to doll up their hair and slip into miniskirts.

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2013 is at least the second year of the Miss Komaba High pageant, and all of the would-be beauty queens pictured here are in fact students at the school (i.e. guys). And just in case anyone is still skeptical over the true gender of the entrants, here’s another photo from this year’s event where the above contestant isn’t covering his Adam’s apple.

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Realizing that accessorization is an important part of female fashion, another participant even took the time to select the perfect hat and pendant to tie his outfit together.

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Given the ample opportunities school uniforms and fashion in general in Japan provide for viewing authentic female teenage thigh, Internet users upset by the bamboozle quickly exhausted the Japanese language’s various phrases for “nasty,” including:

Kimochi warui.
Kimoi.
Kimo.
Kimee.

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We say whatever floats the boats of Komaba High’s student body is their own business, but given the hemline on display, we’re glad it’s been an unseasonably warm fall in Japan this year.

Source: Hachimakiko
Top image: Facebook
Insert images: Wikipedia, Twitter (1, 2, 3), Facebook