Sports Day at Arakawa 7 JHS

Posting this Monday morning because I crashed pretty hard after the nijikai on Sunday night.

Sports Day was nowhere near the disaster I thought it might be, aside from that it started raining around 3pm and now we have to finish it on Tuesday instead. But yeah, aside from a few 7th-graders screwing up scorekeeping, most things went really well. I sat in the head tent with Kubota and Nakamichi and the broadcasting kids all day and mostly just watched things, confirmed scores, and tried to be helpful. I only ended up talking to a few parents since for the most part they weren't allowed to come over to where we were. Met a few former Nanachu students who had come back to watch the Sports Day, some of whom were older siblings of current students.

I brought my little camera and took a whole bunch of pictures and a few movies. If you've never seen a Japanese school Sports Day before this might actually be interesting to you, especially the boys' acrobatics -- people kept asking me if we do that stuff in the US and I'm like "uhhh... no, it's too dangerous, there's no way our school would let/make kids do stuff like this". Infact, I really don't remember ever having events anything like this in school -- I do remember some at summer camp which were like competition/parents-day combined events. Hmm.

For this event the kids split into the Red Team (class 1-1, 2-1, 3-1), White Team (class 1-2, 2-2, 3-2) and Blue Team (1-3, 3-3). Blue Team lost pretty soundly and were just like "it's not fair". We didn't combine scores across, just by year, but still.

Anyway, photos...


Here's the starting parade, with our student council members carrying in the school flags.

( And lj-cut for like 20 more photos and a few movies, and an explanation of the events... )

After the soran bushi dance and a short assembly meeting, the kids were allowed to go home, and we were told that the event would continue on Tuesday for the final three races. Whee.

After the Sports Day the teachers had a "followup meeting" which was really a "let's sit in the lunch room and drink beer and eat snacks for an hour" gathering. Then a lot of them had to go eat a real dinner with the "father's association" for our JHS, and afterwards they were meeting in Oji to do karaoke, and a few were like "come on, come to karaoke with us" so I ended up going to that too. None of the English teachers came to karaoke, but that's ok because I told everyone I wasn't going to sing in English anyway.

As it is, it turns out one of the other teachers LOVES Spitz, and he heard me say that when one of the other teachers asked me beforehand what music I like, so he picked Namida ga Kirari at one point, I followed it with Neko ni Naritai, and we talked about music all the way back to the station afterwards. In general it was actually a surprisingly good time -- 2000 yen for two hours sitting in a karaoke room with 10 teachers, drinking cocktails and singing stuff. The only thing is that a lot of songs I like singing aren't really "party songs" so I was having trouble coming up with things to go with their kind of party atmosphere, but it worked out ok, especially when our music teacher picked some Japanese remix of a Chopin piece, seriously.

But by the time I got home it was like 11pm and I was totally zonked from waking up at 6am and from sports day and from the after-rain stuff and from drinking and so on. Plop. Now it's Monday morning and I think I'm going to go to Jingu and watch some college baseball rookies. Wheeeee!

Monday at Meiji Jingu

I went to Jingu for the afternoon as planned, and since Soukeisen ended yesterday, today was the first day of the "rookie taikai", ie, a mini-tournament for the 6 colleges where only freshmen and sophomores can play. It turns out that for rookie games in the Big 6 college league, they only open up the area behind home plate. I got there like 10:40 for the 11am start, so at first I was in the second row... then some guys moved up because it was too sunny, so I moved to the front row.

First game was Keio-Todai. It was 0-0 until the 4th inning when Todai pitcher Wada just started giving up the ship, and Keio eventually won 11-0. There was a lady down the row from me basically yelling the entire game at the Todai dugout like "What's with you pansies? Why aren't any of you cheering? Why don't I hear anything from you guys? You're too fucking quiet!" The Japanese equivalent, which was only slightly less blunt than that. Halfway through that game, two totally crazy guys moved into the front row as well. More on them in a second. The disappointing thing to me is that I saw freshman Kei Tamura warming up but he didn't actually pitch in the game. Very sad. I really enjoyed watching him in Koshien last year.

Second game was Meiji-Rikkio, which was at least marginally more interesting. It turns out that Yusuke Yamada is on Rikkio's team -- last year he almost made me late for work during a Koshien game by hitting the first pitch of the game out of the park. So I was kind of psyched to see him, except that... as it turns out... those crazy dudes in my row were all huge Meiji supporters. The one guy is some sort of musician and graduated from Meiji, and then there was a really old dude whose son-in-law graduated from Meiji, and a younger guy who currently goes to Meiji, and then another guy who recently graduated from Meiji and kinda plonked down behind us like 2 innings into the game and stuttered really badly and also was a walking meikan kind of like me. But anyway, if there's one kind of person I have no trouble talking to at all, it's crazy baseball fans, so I basically spent the entire second game chatting with these guys, watching the game, and cheering for Meiji. It was a very surreal experience. They all pretty much entirely gave up on trying to speak to me in English after like five seconds, once I started rambling about Koshien and high school baseball and about players from Urawa Gakuin and so on -- and once I said that I'm a Tatsuya Ohishi fan, they went on at length about yesterday's Soukeisen game, where he was the starting SHORTSTOP, played 7 innings there and made some fantastic plays apparently, also hit a triple, AND then went to the mound to close out the game. Dude. He's too cool.

The old man in the group was pretty much completely crazy. At one point he apparently went up to where several other non-rookie Meiji players were sitting and just started talking to them. He came back down like "Shashiki-kun says hi" to one of the other people in the group, and I'm like "Shashiki from Osaka Toin? You talked to him?" and the guy's like "Yeah, you want me to introduce you?" and I'm like "ohmygod no that's ok I'm too shy."

Meiji won 8-2, and after the game a young guy came up to me like (in Japanese) "can I see your scorecard?" and he started reading the Tokyo-Keio game. He said in English, "I want to talk to you in English but I can't speak English," and I replied in Japanese, "that's ok, I can speak Japanese. What university do you go to?" and he answered in Japanese, "I'm a ronin. I'm studying to try to take the Tokyo University entrance exam again next year. My weak point is English and if I don't learn it I can't go to Todai. I feel terrible."

I actually felt kind of bad for him. And then he looked through more of my scorecard and was like "wait a minute, you went to the WBC? and all these other college games? and these Lotte games and... wow!" And then we got kicked out of the stadium because they needed to clean up.

I walked back to Shibuya to take the train home. I stopped at Kua'aina on the way, to get dinner, because I hadn't eaten all day, and then I pretty much just came home after that and did laundry and stuff. Whoosh. I've been looking through my photos, confirming scores, etc.

Actually, one obnoxious thing. I got something in the mail that looks like a "please pay us city taxes" paper. Which I guess isn't that out there, EXCEPT that it's from Kawaguchi city, where I no longer live. I cannot figure if this is their "please pay us taxes for LAST YEAR" bill or if it's for this year. It says 平成２１年度市民税 but I have no clue what that really means. Argh. Times like this where I wish kawaru worked in Tokyo instead of Nagoya :P

But the obnoxious part is, today was Monday and I had it off because of the Sports Day. I won't have another weekday off until July, but the first payment on this thing is due June 30, so I don't know if/when I can go to the shiyakusho and try to straighten things out, if it's a mistake...