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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.
We have a brass band. They were playing the Washington Post for the parade, but that's all they played during the day.
The first event was just a straight race, every student had to enter, they ran around the track in 3's or 4's and whoever won, got points for their "team". I don't really have good photos of it.
The girls ran an 800-meter race.
The boys ran a 1500-meter race. What's funny is that this event was won by two brothers -- the older one, a 3rd-year student, won the race overall and the younger one, a 1st-year, won the race for the 1st-years AND beat all the 2nd-years. I thought that was funny.
This is a relay race event called "chikara wo awasete". Every year did it, and basically some kids had to run as "crabs", where they were connected back to back running sideways, and some kids had to run as "onbu", which means piggyback. So one pair would get to the other side and pass the baton to the next kids, and so on.
The 2nd-years did this "ikada nagashi" race -- basically one kid was on top and had to walk to a cone on the other side of the school yard and back. The catch -- the other kids had to basically form a walkway for that kid to walk on, by bending over and making a road out of their backs.
Next was another relay race that was just a "run around the track and pass the baton to the next person" race. Pretty standard stuff. The 3rd-years and 1st-years did this.
THEN was the big deal of the day, the boys' Kumi Taisou, which means something like "coordinated calisthenics" but to my mind means "crazy-ass synchronized acrobatics/gymnastics". Apparently it's a really traditional Japanese event and in elementary school even the girls do it, but here only the boys do it because they do some crazy stuff. Let me try to explain...
First the 3rd-year boys made "walking pyramids". They were in this formation at the back of the field and walked across it while carrying the pyramids on their shoulders. Then the three top boys stood up and waved flags when they reached the front.
The kids did this thing where they launched each other onto their shoulders from a headstand and then did some tricks in that formation.
One of the tricks was to pass the upper boy over the lower boy into this "flying" formation.
Another formation was this kind of Stonehenge thing.
I have no idea what to call this formation.
For this one, a pair or trio of boys would squat together, another boy would stand on top, and they'd rise up into the air.
Here's another one where groups of 5 or 6 boys made these arches. About 1 second after I took this picture, the taiko drum was banged on and all of the boys simultaneously fell forward onto the ground. SPLAT.
Another formation, in groups of five.
The pyramid, I suppose, is fairly normal in the US. You wouldn't believe how many kids get hurt rehearsing this though.
Here's some of the 3-level towers that the first-year kids did...
...and to give you a better idea of how this went, since this was the grand finale, I took a movie of the 3rd-years doing their huge tower:
Yeah.
At least we had a ton of teachers and some fathers spotting them. In practice, several times, the top boy fell over (infact the boy on top just became the top boy like... a few days ago -- because the other one fell off and they wouldn't let him do it again).
There was a PTA relay race at this point, which was kinda dorky, and then a lunch break. The school gave us bento boxes which would have been fantastic if the rice didn't have tons of little fish in it with eyeballs sticking out.
Anyway, after lunch we started off with our school ouendan performing. I have some videos of that too but didn't put them up. They just kind of did some generic "fure, fure, nanachuu no akagumi" cheers and stuff. I get the feeling half of the kids didn't actually want to be on the ouendan, but it was a requirement for every class to send a few kids there. A few were really into it and really good though. Infact I ended up taking over a pair of parents to videotape it because their son, a 1st-year, really likes yelling, so he was totally into the ouendan thing.
Ouendan cheers.
After the ouendan performance we had the jump rope event...
This freshman class, 1-2, was really great -- they AVERAGED like 15-20 jumps -- but were beaten by 1-1, who got one round of 34 jumps. The far rope-turner was one of my scorekeeper boys and he came back like "WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY GOT 34 JUMPS? YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME".
But anyway, it didn't matter because this class, 3-2, won the event overall. These guys, I am not joking, jumped the rope 48 times consecutively as a class. I've been told that's almost a Nanachu Sports Day record.
The next event was an obstacle course. In groups of 3 or 4, kids had to...
...crawl under a net...
...do the sack-jumping race thing...
...carry a pingpong ball on a spoon for several meters...
...and jump over or crawl under some hurdle gates. It was amusing to watch.
This is called "Hurricane Eyes", another relay race for freshmen. The kids had to, in fours, with a big stick, run around some cones,
and then when they got back to the start, all of the team had to jump over the stick and then the next group had to run out and run around the cones with it.
The next thing was called the "Big Caterpillar Race":
The kids had their feet tied together and had to run around the track as fast as possible. In practice they spent a lot of time yelling "ich! ni! ich! ni!" and falling down, but at the event it went mostly pretty well, aside from the fact that it started raining around then.
Shortly thereafter, our schoolyard had turned into a mud pit.
So we moved indoors for the Soran Bushi dance...
And this is what the girls work on instead of Kumi Taisou -- a traditional Soran Bushi dance. It's basically about fishing ("dokkoisho!" means something like "heave ho!"), so the moves are mostly resembling pulling ropes and throwing fish.
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!
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.
We have a brass band. They were playing the Washington Post for the parade, but that's all they played during the day.
The first event was just a straight race, every student had to enter, they ran around the track in 3's or 4's and whoever won, got points for their "team". I don't really have good photos of it.
The girls ran an 800-meter race.
The boys ran a 1500-meter race. What's funny is that this event was won by two brothers -- the older one, a 3rd-year student, won the race overall and the younger one, a 1st-year, won the race for the 1st-years AND beat all the 2nd-years. I thought that was funny.
This is a relay race event called "chikara wo awasete". Every year did it, and basically some kids had to run as "crabs", where they were connected back to back running sideways, and some kids had to run as "onbu", which means piggyback. So one pair would get to the other side and pass the baton to the next kids, and so on.
The 2nd-years did this "ikada nagashi" race -- basically one kid was on top and had to walk to a cone on the other side of the school yard and back. The catch -- the other kids had to basically form a walkway for that kid to walk on, by bending over and making a road out of their backs.
Next was another relay race that was just a "run around the track and pass the baton to the next person" race. Pretty standard stuff. The 3rd-years and 1st-years did this.
THEN was the big deal of the day, the boys' Kumi Taisou, which means something like "coordinated calisthenics" but to my mind means "crazy-ass synchronized acrobatics/gymnastics". Apparently it's a really traditional Japanese event and in elementary school even the girls do it, but here only the boys do it because they do some crazy stuff. Let me try to explain...
First the 3rd-year boys made "walking pyramids". They were in this formation at the back of the field and walked across it while carrying the pyramids on their shoulders. Then the three top boys stood up and waved flags when they reached the front.
The kids did this thing where they launched each other onto their shoulders from a headstand and then did some tricks in that formation.
One of the tricks was to pass the upper boy over the lower boy into this "flying" formation.
Another formation was this kind of Stonehenge thing.
I have no idea what to call this formation.
For this one, a pair or trio of boys would squat together, another boy would stand on top, and they'd rise up into the air.
Here's another one where groups of 5 or 6 boys made these arches. About 1 second after I took this picture, the taiko drum was banged on and all of the boys simultaneously fell forward onto the ground. SPLAT.
Another formation, in groups of five.
The pyramid, I suppose, is fairly normal in the US. You wouldn't believe how many kids get hurt rehearsing this though.
Here's some of the 3-level towers that the first-year kids did...
...and to give you a better idea of how this went, since this was the grand finale, I took a movie of the 3rd-years doing their huge tower:
Yeah.
At least we had a ton of teachers and some fathers spotting them. In practice, several times, the top boy fell over (infact the boy on top just became the top boy like... a few days ago -- because the other one fell off and they wouldn't let him do it again).
There was a PTA relay race at this point, which was kinda dorky, and then a lunch break. The school gave us bento boxes which would have been fantastic if the rice didn't have tons of little fish in it with eyeballs sticking out.
Anyway, after lunch we started off with our school ouendan performing. I have some videos of that too but didn't put them up. They just kind of did some generic "fure, fure, nanachuu no akagumi" cheers and stuff. I get the feeling half of the kids didn't actually want to be on the ouendan, but it was a requirement for every class to send a few kids there. A few were really into it and really good though. Infact I ended up taking over a pair of parents to videotape it because their son, a 1st-year, really likes yelling, so he was totally into the ouendan thing.
Ouendan cheers.
After the ouendan performance we had the jump rope event...
This freshman class, 1-2, was really great -- they AVERAGED like 15-20 jumps -- but were beaten by 1-1, who got one round of 34 jumps. The far rope-turner was one of my scorekeeper boys and he came back like "WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY GOT 34 JUMPS? YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME".
But anyway, it didn't matter because this class, 3-2, won the event overall. These guys, I am not joking, jumped the rope 48 times consecutively as a class. I've been told that's almost a Nanachu Sports Day record.
The next event was an obstacle course. In groups of 3 or 4, kids had to...
...crawl under a net...
...do the sack-jumping race thing...
...carry a pingpong ball on a spoon for several meters...
...and jump over or crawl under some hurdle gates. It was amusing to watch.
This is called "Hurricane Eyes", another relay race for freshmen. The kids had to, in fours, with a big stick, run around some cones,
and then when they got back to the start, all of the team had to jump over the stick and then the next group had to run out and run around the cones with it.
The next thing was called the "Big Caterpillar Race":
The kids had their feet tied together and had to run around the track as fast as possible. In practice they spent a lot of time yelling "ich! ni! ich! ni!" and falling down, but at the event it went mostly pretty well, aside from the fact that it started raining around then.
Shortly thereafter, our schoolyard had turned into a mud pit.
So we moved indoors for the Soran Bushi dance...
And this is what the girls work on instead of Kumi Taisou -- a traditional Soran Bushi dance. It's basically about fishing ("dokkoisho!" means something like "heave ho!"), so the moves are mostly resembling pulling ropes and throwing fish.
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!
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That stuff is pretty crazy.