Today in Sports

Hello! Time for an update from my actual life rather than from the wide world of Japanese TV. This time of year, everyone at junior high school is abuzz regarding the upcoming Sports Festival. The Sports Festival is this upcoming Sunday, and in preparation for the upcoming extravaganza, the school schedule for the past two weeks has been rather strange. We had off this past Monday because we have school this Saturday, and likewise we have the following Monday off bc we have to attend the Sports Festival on Monday. Today however was an exceedingly special day. It was the Sports Festival Practice Day. Nearly as big an event as the aforementioned Sports Festival, the Sports Festival Practice Day features everything the Sports Festival does, including all the races, speeches, cheering and award ceremonies, the only differences being the teachers yell a lot more at the students to march straight and dance correctly, and that they only practice the award ceremony, the vice principal only goes through the motions of handing over a certificate and trophy to the winning team. Anyway, it was pretty interesting to watch. I think I've been adopted by the White Team, and was sort of rooting for them today. They looked pretty weak, but somehow they managed to pull out second place in the Practice Day. I participated in the girls dance, and was the only male to do so. Many of the girl students were jealous that I danced with one of the woman teachers, and during the group dance, everyone of the first grade girls that I had to hold hands with was embarrassed out of their minds. So the festival itself involves lots of marching by the boys, followed by a dance and cheering by the girls, and lots and lots of races. They are only the vanilla and relay variety, and after a couple hours of the same thing, they get kind of boring. The monotony is broken at two points by two unique, slightly more dangerous games. The first is something like capture the flag. Each team, of which there are four, has an approx. 10 ft. pole, at the top of which is their team's flag. Around 7 students hold their team's pole up, while around 10 must run to the opposing teams' poles and capture their flag. This can be done two ways: by climbing over everyone and up the pole, or by pushing/pulling the pole over and grabbing the flag. teams get a point for each opposing flag captured, and another point if they retain their own flag after an allotted time. No injuries happened today, but it certainly has potential. The second game involved a different ~10 ft. pole, with five students holding it horizontally. The students then had to run around a couple of cones with everyone holding the pole, then run back to their team and pass the pole off to the next five people. It's quite an interesting race with a fair amount of strategy involved. The whole festival took most of the day. We get to do the whole thing again on Sunday. Hooray. Here are some pictures:

Boys Marching

Students getting yelled at

Doing weird warm up stretches to some weird radio recording that they
play every morning at most offices. Everyone in Japan knows the warm up
routine. It's kind of creepy.

Boys relay race

Happy girl winning a race

Boys capture the flag game.

Students sitting in boxes behind a netting. I have no idea why.

Hisasiburi!

Ok, tonight, I'm finally watching TV again. I've forgotten what a fantastic adventure can be had in TV land. Also, my attempt to blog from my mobile failed. Chris is smarter than me.

Anyway, I don't know what tonight's show is called, but its a common one where a panel of celebrity contestants has to read various obscure kanji and kanji compounds to either win prizes/food or avoid somewhat painful punishments. The first game involved food related kanji, and if the contestant got it right, they were allowed to eat the food associated with that kanji. The second game was pretty strange. The contestants had to guess the long word or phrase that a shortened pair of kanji stood for, kind of like an acronym quiz. They had approx 5 seconds or so to answer. If they got it right, they chose another contestant for the next question. If they got it wrong, however, they were beaten by two small Russian boys wearing white dresses and angel wings/halos, and then taken to 'heaven', a small room offstage. After a little bit, the Russian boys started to go crazy and started beating the old guy named Tamori, and he responded by doing a Russian dance. The next game involved drawing kanji in the correct stroke order. If wrong, two large balloons popped right next to your ears. The next game involved reading the kanji for the names of various hot springs around Japan. If they got it right, they got a small prize. Tamori is a genius and gets nearly all of them right without a hint, while Eiji Wentz of WAT needs to work on his kanji. It would be acceptable if he spoke a language other than Japanese, but he doesn't. Frown on you. I got the last special one right because we went there for our round Kyushu trip. It was Ibusuki, which indeed has a strange reading for its kanji. Also, I'm a genius.

Sorry

Sorry, its been a while since I've written about the wonderful world of Japanese TV. I've seen a couple interesting shows, but have been too lazy to type about them. Tonight, however, is the show called Lincoln. I might have mentioned it before. It's hosted by the very popular manzai duo Downtown, supported by a large array of various other comedians. I'm not really sure what the premise of the show is, but it usually seems to revolve around some sort of one off game show hosted by Downtown. One of the more memorable ones involved a 2 hour special, the centerpiece of which was a $160,000 dollar prop that exploded 15 minutes into the show. Last week's show had a segment celebrating all famous people with a born in March. They rented out a big banquet room in a hotel, but only a couple people showed up, three of which were members of the show. A special guest comedian congratulated them from the stage and sang a song that went something like 'Chinko, unko, hitomoji shika chigainai, megane, oshiri, zenzen chigau,' which loosely translated means 'Penis, poop, have only one character that is different (using Japanese characters), glasses, butt, are totally different.' An old, classical singing lady in the audience who was celebrating her birthday looked very confused.

Tonight's show is a parody of the once popular show "Toribia no Izumi", which had a short run in America as "Hey! Spring of Trivia." The original show starred two hosts and a panel of 5 judges that explored various pieces of extremely random trivia. Each trivia point was awarded a number of 'hey's, which is kind of like 'wow' in Japanese. The parody show tonight substitutes 'dondake's for 'hey's. I have no idea what 'dondake' means, but I'm assuming its some strange word in the Osaka dialect, something Downtown are famous for using. Anyway, the interesting things they showed were one comedian's house that he burned down accidentally bc he was careless with his cigarettes, an impression of Mr. Bean miming strange, vaguely sexual actions, and another comedian changing his clothes in under 10 seconds. In true Lincoln style, they introduced the final bit of trivia only to stop short of the last word and leave the viewers hanging until next week to find out what the final trivia tidbit was. Boo. So that's it for tonight's update. Hopefully I'll be back after celebrating Golden Week by driving around Kyushu in a rented utility van.