So last Sunday, I attended North Shimoda Elementary School's Sports Festival. Now a 'sports' festival in Japan may not be like the sports days or field days you had in your elementary schools. Scratch that; they are most definitely different.
First of all, elementary school kids practice for weeks leading up to the sports festival. Everyone has to learn how to march, where to march, when to go where, how to do the stretching dance, how to do the cheering dance, when and how to do celebration cheers, how to run to the podium to give a speech.... Several students will be flag bearers, team leaders, and may even give short speeches or presentations in front of the whole school/community, so there are a lot of ceremonial technicalities that have to be hammered out, memorized, and practiced.
In almost every case, students are split into two teams, red and white. Students where little baseball caps (with string straps) of the corresponding color, which are invertible so they can be used for either team.
With much ceremony, students march into the field area, lead by flag bearers, listen to speeches from the first graders, the school president, and other important people. After that, the games begin! Since Shimoda North is a small school (24 kids?), people from the community also participate, wearing little colored scarves to indicate which section of the village they are from. My second host family, the Kikai family, were gracious enough to adopt me into their team, the blue team "Yu no Moto" 湯の本 (Origin of Hot Water (remember Shimoda North is a hot spring town)). This meant that I got to participate in more events too!
Now every sports festival will be different depending on the school, but at the one I attended last week, these are some of the events which the students and neighbors enjoyed: various races (relay, individual), giant ball race (push a giant, 5 foot tall rubber ball around the track), giant pants race (see video, don giant pair of pants with your partner, grab a cookie with your teeth, then pop a balloon between your bodies), tug of war, eating race (just small snack food, like a cream filled bun; I did this one too, but no one wants to see a video of me cramming cream filled bun into my mouth), among others.
I had a great time helping out with one race (running alongside two sixth graders and my principal), the eating race, and the giant pants race. Sadly, during lunch, there was a deluge of rain that forced us to get soaking wet as we close down all of the tents, move everything inside, and end the festival early.
What event could possibly be fitting to end the day's festivities? A rock-paper-scissors tournament! Japanese people LOVE LOVE LOVE rock-paper-scissors (called jan-ken in Japan). Many important decisions are made by janken, and the Japanese have even figured out a way to have more than two people play janken at once and still have a decisive winner by the end of it. Many games that are suggested in JET program teaching handbooks involve janken and chanting various English phrases, as everyone knows it will get your kids riled up REALLY fast.
I, of course, lost in the very first round, so I did not get a prize. Prizes for the top winners included small barbecues, chairs, food goods, and the grand prize (drum roll please): two giant bags of rice! Yum! To be fair, rice is an expensive commodity, so to a Japanese person two free bags of rice is quite the grand prize.
Sadly, most of the other sports day festivals I will visit in the future will not be ones I can participate in. Only North and South Shimoda and Fukuregi have sports festivals that include events for adults too. Not that watching the festivals isn't fun enough, it's just that it is even MORE fun when I get to participate as if I'm part of the community too. Yeah?
I've been lucky enough to get a sneak peak of most of my students' team cheer dances, since the whole school practices during school hours. The red team at Ooe includes a Sailor Moon skit at the end, and the red and white teams at South Shimoda have unicycles as part of their dances.
Note: For some reason, all of the elementary schools here have unicycles, and all of the kids know how to ride them. Weird. I wish I could.
Also note: Map of my town down at the bottom of the blog page. If you are reading this in google reader, try visiting the website.
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