Japanese School Part 3: Sports Day

To say Sports Day at the girls' Japanese school was an event would be a pretty gross understatement. I think they started practicing for it in April. And by practicing for it, I don't mean training for events. In the week lead up, the girls usually had at least one session each day (approx. 1hr) preparing with their class or grade, and sometimes more as they prepared with the school as a whole. 

Sports day was scheduled for Saturday, but in the information they sent home, there was a contingency plan for if Saturday was rainy. Then spots day would be postponed to Sunday and the students would still have school on Saturday (with the Monday timetable). If it was also raining on Sunday, sports day would be moved to Tuesday (for some unknown reason, Monday would always be a day off). They even planned for a back up plan for that, because if it was raining on the Tuesday, sports day would be Wednesday. After that, it was tough luck and no sports day. 

As it happened, Saturday was rainy, so the girls went off to school for five hours and came home at 2. Sunday was a mix of cloudy and sunny, but a very humid 30 degree heat. With lots of warning about making sure everyone had enough water to stay hydrated and encouragement to parents to bring fans and cooling devices (but no recommendations for sunscreen), sports day was a go. 

The girls were at school at 8 and parents arrived after 8:10 to be ready for the 8:35 start. The band (including Sophie on saxophone) played the fanfare to start. They sounded great. Probably because they have been practicing every single morning before school from 7:30. Sophie herself told me that the band sounded fantastic compared to her Australian band, and did make the connection that practicing every day had something to do with it. 

All the grades lined up in their two teams (white and red), and marched forward across the oval. There were speeches from the Principal, a vow of trying their best from the sports captains and a group of grade 1 students had a cute moment talking about their first sports day and how excited they were. Then they did cheers. It was like a war cry competition in Australia, but not only did they cheer for their own team, but they took turns encouraging the opposing team as well. 

The students then did a warm up, based on the national radio-taiso exercises and at last the competition began! Each grade had a presentation of some kind that somehow contributed to the points. Some were easier to understand the points system than others. The year 3&4 students, for example, had a tug of war. Easy to see the winning team who got 20 points. The year 5 students (Rachel's grade) did the soran bushi, which is a traditional fisherman dance and I have no idea how that was scored. 

The thing that was most fun to watch was the year 5&6 students do a team relay activity. There were a stack of four cardboard boxes for each team with "red/white team winners!" written on in kanji. Three students from each team had to run up to the opposing teams boxes and throw them all over the place. They would then run back to the start, and the next group of three students would go to their own boxes (now scattered all around by the other team) and they would re-stack them in order (so they read the right message) as quickly as possible. Then they would run back and then next group of three would start the process all over again. It was so fun to watch and we were really cheering for the white team (for the girls) to win. I will definitely be including it as an activity in a school event in the future. 

The year 6s had the last item of the day, which was a very long (12 minutes!) piece where they did a combination of dances and stretches/yoga moves. On the gravel/dirt/crusher dust oval. Barefoot. Suddenly Sophie complaining about doing a bridge and then a candlestick made sense. 

The only actual "sports day" type event that every student did was a running race. Year 5&6 did 80m, which was two thirds of the way around the oval, because it's so small. No other races, or field events. Honestly, there really wasn't any space anyway. And because the oval is dirt, the lines marking the track kept having to get redrawn after almost every grade. I was so impressed at how quickly the teachers could redraw the circles in the middle for the various events (like that tama-ire (literally ball-in, where the year 1's threw bean bags at a basket on a pole)). 

When it was all done, the students lined up again, marched across the oval and waited for the scores to be revealed. The score board was hung off the balcony of one of the buildings (you can see it in the photo above). They had been updating through the day, but they took down the numbers just before the end and some year 1 students got to race up and put the numbers up for the final score. It was pretty fun, even though the white team lost. 

Photos were super hard to get, because it was standing room only for parents, and the kids were under marquees across the oval (on their chairs that they carried out of their classrooms), but hope this gives a little snap into sports day. It finished just after 12:30, but the kids had to pack up and have lunch before coming home. They were pretty wrecked when they did come home, because they had just had seven days straight of school, including the intense sports day prep lessons. Luckily, Monday was a day off and Tuesday was too (because of reasons... Sunday sports day reasons I guess?), so they had a weekend and a short week of school to finish it off.