運動会 - Undoukai

Undoukai is a yearly sports festival that every elementary school in Japan holds.  It is a sort of track and field day with other types of performances mixed in.  In junior high, they have the 学園祭 (Gakuensai) which usually has both a sports day and a culture day.  As far as elementary schools are concerned, this is the biggest event of the year.  My home school hosted its Undoukai last Sunday, the eighteenth.  Regrettably, I am not allowed to post pictures of students or staff, so this will be a pretty visually dull post.  Gomen nasai.

First, a word on why undoukai exists.  Modern Japanese education started in the late 1800's as part of the Meiji government's attemtps to build a strong and modern nation.  For this purpose, they opted for a military education which you can still see the effects of in their school uniforms and things like undoukai where the kids compete in a variety athletic events that help foster a competitive nature and good teamwork, etc.  Of course, since the war Japan has been a pacifist nation and now undoukai is just a school festival which now has events which the founders of the Meiji state would probably not approve of, not to mention the music selection.

For the competition, the school divides into teams.  Because Iwade is so small, it is divided into red and white teams.  Larger schools have a blue team, and my Friday school has a yellow team as well.  At Iwade, they had the red team subdivided into pink and orange and the white team subdivided into blue and green.  For each competitive event they got a certain number of points for first through fourth place and then these were added up and added to the overall red-white score.

At 9:00, the opening ceremony started.  First, the students paraded in to place in the traditional militaristic style.  Next, there were speeches by the principal, PTA president and student body president before we sang the school song.  Somewhere in there, we had one of my favorite Japanese school ceremony activities: the introduction of every member of the PTA.  Much like at events in America where people are introduced individually and the applause peters off after a while, everyone bows to each member of the PTA as they come forward to bow after being introduced.  Makes you wish they would ask the audience to hold their bows until the end.

After this, everyone stretched (students, staff, and even the PTA) before the morning activities.  First, the teams lined up opposite one another and had a chanting war, taking turns chanting first about how they would win and then about how the other team would lose.  Then, they started the events, which included a relay race for the lower three grades, a race where four people were strapped to two by fours, and a strange type of tug-of-war where there were five ropes and the kids were allowed to pull at whichever one they chose and switch ropes at will.  Each team was awarded two points for getting a rope all the way to its side and one point if the rope was closer to its side than its opponent's.  Between these things there were other events.  One involved next year's first graders had to race for grab bags.  Three others involved parents and students playing together, one was golf themed, another involved passing three soccer balls tied together with strings back and forth, and the last was a race where the pairs had to run to a cone keeping a balloon between them, popping the balloon between them at the cone, then one giving the other a piggyback ride back to the line.  It was very entertaining.

Then the morning portion closed out with the younger grades (1st-3rd) doing a dance with pom poms to a song by AKB48, a very popular J-pop group.  This is chiefly what I meant when I was talking about the Meiji founders being disappointed in their descendants.  It was very fun to watch, though some of the second grade boys seemed less enthusiastic about how shiny their pom poms than others.

After the lung break, the festivities resumed with a Taiko performance, Taiko being traditional Japanese drums.  This was followed by a strange relay where three students had to weave through cones while holding on to a bar which they then had to bring back to their line, run it under their jumping teammates, then back to the front of the line over their now ducking teammates.  That one had “tempest” in the title.  After this, the older grades competed in tug-of-war, followed by the lower grades.  Then the older grades did a traditional dance where they mostly mimed bringing in fishing nets.  Then the lower grades had a competition where they had to throw beanbags into a basket eight feet or so in the air.  The last competition for the fourth through sixth graders and was a relay race which was really close.  

The score between the red and white teams had been close all day and was tied before the relay, but by taking first and third in the relay White came out ahead 52 to 50.  The day wrapped up with another speech from the principal before the school flag was presented to the white team captain.  Then they marched out the same way they came in.

That’s about all I have for this.  It was a lot of fun and the kids seemed to enjoy themselves.  Three of my other schools will hold their festivals tomorrow (tomorrow is a national holiday here) and the fifth will be next Saturday, so after next week I should be back to my normal schedule.  I had very few classes in September due to all the practice that went into these festivals, so I hope they enjoyed themselves.  They certainly seemed to at Iwade.

Well, that’s all for this week.  I plan to travel this weekend, so hopefully I can post more about that next week