SPORTS DAY
Sports day was recently!
The closest thing that I can compare Japanese Sports Day to is like a really amped up version of American Field Day.
Let’s start with the shirts. There are seven classes in each grade at my school and the classes were all assigned a color to be worn by all three grades (so for example all of the students in classes 101, 201, and 301 wore yellow shirts. Homeroom teachers wore the color associated with their class.), and they were a BIG DEAL. The colors were as follows:
Class one: yellow
Class two: pink
Class three: green
Class four: blue
Class five: black
Class six: red
Class seven: purple
Although the students had to wear the color associated with their class number, each homeroom was able to design their shirts to their liking. Some of them had puns based on brands like Vans and The North Face, while others just had sports mottos or words of encouragement. All of them had English on them (yay!) and most of them were wrong (“My best moment in the life” …so close!). I was hoping some of my third year students would give me a shirt so I could cheer on their class, but alas! I did not receive. HOWEVER, I did get shirt from class 203, which means I wore….GREEN! I also wore my Boston Red Sox hat and sunglasses, which all the students though was *METCHA KAWAII* (“LOLEN. Today is…..very AMERIKAJIN!”). Girl, I know it. B-)
OKAY now on to the events. There were five main events featured on sports day. Some you may have heard of, others maybe not so much:
Class relay
Yeah, this is one that everyone knows right? The class relay race! This was really fun to watch and I enjoyed cheering on the students as they ran by. Even if I didn’t know each student’s name, I could still yell out their T-shirt color with a GAAAAANBAREEEEE and they would be excited. Speaking of the students running by, goddamn were some of these kids fast. One kid in the purple class has got to be like the fastest kid on the planet. Oh man though, this one girl in the red class took a real nasty tumble on her go-around the track and it looked like her body was as bruised as her ego. As you may be able to guess, purple team came in first and red team came in last.
Big Jump Rope
It’s a jump rope! It’s big! It’s the big jump rope! Just like recess in elementary school, each class lined up and jumped the big rope as many times as they could. However, unlike recess in elementary school, these kids could jump like a hundred consecutive times (aside from Dekashita sensei’s homeroom class who did exceptionally terrible in this event, never managing to jump more than twice in a row, which probably deserves an award in itself)
Tug of War
Tug of war is another one that everyone knows. They had this enormous rope and had the grades take turns tugging war on each other. Of course, the third year students won, which I attribute largely in part to the enormous Sumo club kids in the back holding down the fort, but I have to say the first years put up a pretty solid fight.
Mukade Race
Okay this one requires some explanation. Mukade means centipede in Japanese. But mukade aren’t just any old centipede, they are these monsters that hide in your shoes and go bump in the night. They bite, they sting, and they are terrible creatures (thank god I’m in the city where they are less common). So anyways, the fourth event was a centipede race. The students broke up into groups of 8 within their classes then tied their legs together and had to race across the field. There were definitely a lot of scraped knees in this one. I don’t know who won this race, I don’t even know if they were keeping score because it was just chaos in every direction.
??????
Finally there was this race. I have no idea what this race was called but it was absolutely bananas. The students broke up into groups of 8 within their class (like the mukade race) but I saw that one student had his shoes off. Here I am naively thinking that this kid just prefers to run with no shoes, but turns out there was one student from EVERY group without shoes. They all lined up at the start line with the barefoot student at the back of the line and then bent over. When the race started, the barefoot student JUMPS on top of the other student and RUNS ACROSS THEIR BACKS. Once the barefoot student has crossed another student, that student would then run to the front of the line and that’s how the race progressed. I have never seen anything like this and you probably haven’t either, and I unfortunately didn’t take any photos so here is a drawing approximation:
Anyways, sports day was a really fun day and everyone enjoyed themselves. I almost had myself a happy cry when at the end of the day, all of the third year students were talking a photo of the entire grade and they were like “LOLEN….YOU COME TOO. LOOOOOLEEEEEN PHOTOOOOOOO!!!” so I jumped in the photo with them, I love my lil nuggets :’)
See if you can find me!
