Sports Festival

Every September, my school, and I think every school in my area, if not all of Japan, has a sports festival. The sports festivals here are nothing like a track and field day in Canada. For starters, all studies are put on hold for a portion of everyday for a week or so before the sports festival to practice. These events that they are practicing aren’t your average long jumps or 100m dashes either.

First off, each sports festival starts off with an opening ceremony. Each grade and class (each grade has about 4 classes within it, with about 35 students in each class) marches around the field. They are lead by the student chairmen of the event, as well as some students who carry the school’s flag, the Japanese flag, and a banner that represents the theme of the sports day. During the march, the school band plays a nice marching tune the sets the mood.

Then there’s the actual events. Each race is a team event to help support the Japanese motto “it’s about the group, not the individual.” There were a bunch of different relay races and then the really cool races.

There was a really cool race called the caterpillar race. The classes were divided by their genders and raced from one end of the field to the other, and then back again. Here’s the catch, each team and one person who ran across the backs of their teammates. Once you’ve been run upon, you have to stand up, run to the end of the row, bend over and wait to get run upon once again. If the runner falls, the next person to be stepped on has to get on all fours and act as a step. It was a really interesting race to watch. Especially since I knew nothing like this would ever happen in Canada.

There was another cool race to watch. Each class was lined up in rows of four. A group of four would hold onto a giant bamboo rod, run to the other end of the field, go around two pylons, and run back. When they got back to their team they had to drag the rod under their team, who jumped over it as it came, and then bring it to the front and hand it off to the next group of four.

There were also some tug of war games and a two-legged type of race, only the whole team was tied to each other.

The other events were much larger events that took a lot more time to practice.

The grade 8 & 9 girls did two really good dances that are based on a very popular dance style in Japan called Para Para. It’s like line dancing, but it’s more for a group and focuses mostly on arm and hand movements rather then leg movements. It was very well done, but the girls weren’t smiling. A few of the female teachers and I tried to get them to smile while they danced, but they were too busy concentrating on the dance movements to think about smiling. Oh well…

The grade 7 kids performed a traditional Japanese dance. Tradition Japanese dances are always based on some sort of work. This one was based on being fishermen. Their actions represented pulling in the nets and throwing the fish into the boats. Or at least, that’s how it was explained to me. I found it really cute cause there was a lot of “e-yah”s shouted, and the grade 7 students have very high pitched voices.

The, for lack of a better term, gymnastics that the grade 8 & 9 boys did were simply amazing! They displayed such feats of strength and agility and danger that I know would never be allowed in a school function anywhere in North America. One thing they did was a simple pyramid made up of 6 students. Wanna know how they got down? They just flattened themselves and fell onto the sand below. And that field is all sand. All the way down. Another amazing feat was called the fan. It included 5 people, one in the middle holding the other four up who were leaning towards the group. My favorite was called the wave. A group of boys got on their knees, locked arms and moved as a group to simulate the movement of a wave across the horizon. Then the coup de grace was a 7 layer pyramid, with the boy on top standing and holding a banner. The banner the top boy held said something about the school celebrating its 50^th anniversary. Those boys actually climbed on top of each other to get to their spots, and then climbed back down again. Which is good, cause I think one boy went home one day with a broken rib or something from falling from one of these stances.

It’s probably a good thing we don’t try this stuff back home.

So that was the sports festival. It was so interesting to watch and learn more about Japan through this activity. And after wards I got to go to a dinner party with my co-workers and watch them make their own pyramid in the restaurant after they had one too many drinks. Yeah, I work with a crazy bunch.

PS - Sorry there's no pics, but I promised my principal that I wouldn't post them on the Internet.