Tatsuno East Junior High School Sports Festival

Here's something that would never happen in the US - the first two weeks of classes were cancelled so that the kids could practice for this thing called Sports Festival. Sports festival is something that every school in Japan has, and is a big community event - the parents come out for the whole day and the kids reherse forver for it. It was started about 100 years ago in schools, and was adapted from military training. I gotta admit, the kids are really tough and take a beating - both during practice and the actual event. I saw so many broken arms, wrists, ankles, legs, by the time of the actual event, it totally looked liked the aftermath a big battleground.

The students made posters for the event and hung them up around the school for the parents and townspeople to check out before the event started.

This one was my favorite. Note that in Japan, the sun is red, not yellow.

The students form 6 teams - Pink, White, Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow. Each team has a mix of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year students and a guy and a girl captain from the 3rd year. It's a very competetive event and the student leaders and council plan all summer for it, and then the students practice the entire two weeks for it.

Cardboard Races - The first event was a cardboard relay race:

Put four in a box, two backwards, running fast as possible.

One sitting on the cardboard, two pulling.

Mucade Races - Mucade is Japanese for "Centipede." For this event, the students for teams of 8-10 and all tie their legs together, and all attempt synchronized running:
When it works, it looks really impressive and the students really haul ass.

But... if they are slightly out of synch, which often happens when the students are hauling ass at top running speed:

... you end up with a pretty bad trainwreck (the guy in front usually gets it the worst).

Next event was the Tug of War. All teams at once, with multiple ropes, so you either get some very fast finish mismatches, or...
...some really big battles with students pullin' tough.



Mounted Horse event:
This was a crazy event! It's supposed to simulate on horse hand-to-hand combat. Three kids make the horse, and the rider is on top, wearing a hat of their team's color. The object of the game is to knock off as many of the other team's hat without getting yours knocked off.

The girls all had to wear gloves to protect their nails and keep from gouging each other's eyes out.
Yusuke, my supervisor's son. His team (pink) ended up winning the entire Sports Festival.
With the boys, as soon as the whistle blows it's a totall melee. The teachers have to get into the mix and we "spot" the kids, as usually a few of them get decked so hard they fall off their horses. The girls, however, is the complete opposite - as soon as the whistle blows, the majority of them scramble to run away from each other, resulting in the few aggressive girl-horses picking off hats if they can catch the others.
I heard of one year during this event, one of the kids fell so hard that he got knocked out cold with a concussion. With as rough as this event is (as well as the Mucade Race) it's just a total lawsuit waiting to happen, you'd think, right?! Wrong. Not in Japan. As for the kid who got knocked out, his parents came to the school and made a formal APOLOGY for their kid not being tough enough to fight in the crazy hand-to-hand combat!? Talk about absurd! My guess is that since Sports Festival is viewed as such a pastime that they saw it as totally normal for their kid to be clocked so hard.

Team Spirit Routines:
The final event of the day was a team-spirit routine, where each team came up with their own performance and unveiled it to the school. There are certain rules (can't purchase anything, but you can make things - usually drums, flags, costumes, etc), and it's a big deal because this event scores the most points and so the students have spent the most time rehearsing in secret. They even have a panel of judges to score the event!



After the sports day, the teachers had a huge party called an "enkai." Man these Japanese teachers know how to party. We went to this awesome restaurant with gorgeous food and man these teachers drank like fish. During the enkai, you get these really small drinking glasses, and you're not supposed to pour your own drink - you are supposed to pour for other people while saying "otsukara sama desu," which means, "thanks for your hard work." Then you pour them a drink. This all starts of relatively tame but you end up drinking a lot really fast because of these small cups and everybody is going around thanking each other (with the intention of getting each other bombed).

Since I'm the new teacher, everybody was out to get me wasted - we had to do skits after the dinner and I was supposed to be giving an English lesson (boy what a trainwreck that turned out to be).

Man these teachers are wild! In addition to the human trampoline, the teachers had rolling somersault competition, and TONS of karaoke. Can you imagine this happening at a work party back home?