Sports Day, Drinking Party, Go-Cart Racing
This past Saturday was the Sports Day at Godo Junior High School. Sports Day is on of the more bizarre aspects of the Japanese schools, and this is the fourth time I've observed it. However as far as I can remember at least this is the first time I've seen it at the Junior High School level. I'm trying to remember now if there were sports days at Ajimu Junior High School and I just never went, or if were no Junior High School sports days in Ajimu. Josh, Aaron, Mike, if any of you are reading this maybe you could help me out.

Anyway, yeah....Sports days are bizarre, as any foreigner in Japan will attest to. For instance josh has written a little bit on his blog about Sports days in Ajimu. This blog is still less than a year old, but all the previous years I've been here I think I've written long e-mails about the event.

The word "Sports Day" is somewhat of a mis-translation in that it's not really sports so much as a bunch of silly games, such as "Three-legged race" or "steal the other team's flag" type game. It would however be a mistake to think that because all the games are so silly that sports day is not taken seriously. On the contrary. They take it very...very....Seriously.

Practice for the Sports Day starts about a month prior to the actual event, and the last couple weeks before the sports day normal classes all but grind to a halt so that they can practice. But (and here's the really bizarre thing) most of this time is not spent practicing the games themselves but practicing the opening and closing ceremonies, the lining up in rows and bowing in unison, and the cheering.

The lack of practice for the actual events themselves can sometimes be very apparent when the games start. My favorite memory of sports day is from the first year I was in Ajimu. I've retold it several times, so some of you might have heard this before, but it still brings a smile to my face whenever I think of it:

There was a uni-cycle performance at the elementary schools. The kids were riding around on uni-cycles, and had this whole choreographed performance planned out were they were riding together in formation. But they were just falling of these uni-cycles left and right. Most of the time it was just a little fall, where they would catch themselves before they hit the ground. But then sometimes they would really biff it. The Sports Day music is sort of a cheesy "Here come the clowns" type circus music. So imagine if you will this music playing on the loudspeakers, the kids all falling off their uni-cycles, and me in the stands laughing so hard my sides were hurting.

But I digress. Back to this year's sports day.

I was assigned to the "Blue Team", which really meant nothing more than wearing the team's colors and cheering for them. Out of the 3 teams, my team came in dead last, which was a huge blow to the kids, but they took first place in the jump-rope part of the competition, so they were able to console themselves with that.

That night the teachers had a drinking party to celebrate all the hard work everyone had put into Sports day. Drinking parties, like Sports days, are another bizarre aspect of Japanese culture that I have already written about several times since I arrived.

The difference now is the school I'm at is bigger than the schools I taught in at Ajimu, which means there are more teachers, which, by simple law of proportions, means more young people my age. So it is no longer just me and the old men. In fact, there are several teachers younger than me at this school. A sign I suppose that I'm getting older. When I first arrived in Japan at the age of 23 I was the youngest faculty member at all of the schools I taught at, but now some of the Japanese faculty I teach with are now actually younger than I am.

Anyway, it's amazing how much more fun these drinking parties can be when you're around people you're own age. I had a great time.

The following Sunday a Japanese co-worker and her husband took me out to go go-cart racing. Besides following around at amusement parks, I had never done any serious go-cart racing before. And this was a bit more serious. The go-carts were racing around at very high speeds. I had to wear a helmet, and even a special suit to ride in the things.

Doing something for the first time in Japan is always a bit embarrassing because you stick out so much more. If I was a Japanese person doing go-carting for the first time, no one would pay attention to me, but I feel pretty silly being the big goofy foreigner everyone is looking at who has no idea what he is doing behind the steering wheel of the go-cart. Plus I could barely even fit inside the go-cart, which made me feel even more ridiculous. But I swallowed my pride and drove the go-cart around the track a few times, and it was pretty fun once I got into it.