分かんない: 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.