Sports' Day

In 1964, Tokyo hosted the summer Olympics. Since then, the second Monday of October is a national holiday to remember that special occasion. Every year, junior high schools around Japan have a special Sports' Day to celebrate Japan's athletic achievements. My school's Sports' Day was last Saturday and I have compiled a video of the students for you to have a glimpse into my current world. Sports' Day is really a perfect example of Japanese society, thinking, and methodology and to help you better understand what you are viewing, I will describe several things. First, there are five third-year student classes. At the beginning of the school year, the tansho (the five guys carrying the flags, wearing longer headbands, as well as arm bands) were each randomly assigned a team color -- red, white, blue, yellow, and green. The younger two grades were then separated by class into these five teams. Therefore, each color team has between 2-3 entire classes. Every student is required to participate and the older students develop their skills as leaders as they teach the younger ones. The students have been working hard for the past five months for the Most Valuable Group (remember, Japan is all about the group!!) award. Each team divides its members to compete in a series of events including recognizable ones such as sprints, relay races, three-legged races, and tug-of-war. The students also compete in very traditional Japanese events such as the "horseman" competition, where three students act as the horse carrying the newspaper origami/earthquake helmet bestooned "samurai" and the "bamboo pull," which is based on an old Japanese folk story. The highlights of the events are the girls' dance competitions and boys' pyramids. Ultimately, the points are tallied from each event and the group with the highest set of points win. To make your viewing of the below video more interesting, I highly encourage you to look for the chair "shoes," the boy who keeps on hopping even when he loses one of his stilts, and the two most colorful teachers (they are wearing their respective team colors). As far as the slogan presented on the banner, it loosely translates as "At Shinohara there are five sleeping buds, that will blossom into flowers at Sports' Day." The art club (all girls!) were so proud of their banner, I'm not so sure the boys were all that impressed!

The rest of the story... So, my camera died right after the band started. Therefore, I missed taking pictures of the revealing of the MVG. When the scores were tallied, the Blue Team beat the Green Team by one point, but the White Team actually was awarded the MVG cup. I'm not sure why, but then again I'm not sure why a lot of things happen as they do here in Japan :-)