School Spirit

This weekend was Taiwa JHS' sports festival (undokai). This event is a huge deal. Classes were canceled to have time to practice. Kids practiced after school. A lot of preparation goes into the junior high's sports festival.

The school was divided into 5 teams: orange, red, blue, green, and yellow. Each team consisted of one class from each grade. The kids all wore headbands of their team's color. Each class also made a flag, so the whole event was very colorful.

The festival took place on the field (sand lot) in front of the school. Many parents brought picnic lunches and sat on the side watching.

The event began with all the students marching across the field. I can't decide if the marching is cool or kind of scary. Then there were quite a few opening speeches, a lot of bowing, some shouting from the team leaders, and stretches. Everyone stretched...the students, the principle, the PTA members...

The morning was filled with lots of fun events. There were some almost-western style relays, except an entire class ran as one relay team as opposed to 4 people. The ichi-nen-sei (1st year students) jump roped. Only they did it in cooperative Japanese style, where the entire class or 30 or more jumped together with one rope. While this seems impossible to the independently focused Westerner, they were surprisingly good at it. During one practice, I saw class 1-4 jump 23 times in a row. The ni-nen-sei (2nd year students) had a crazy relay involving alternating groups of three boys with legs tied together (like a 3-legged race) and pairs of girls who had to run with a balloon between them. The san-nen-sei (3rd year students) had a relay race where groups of 8 had their legs all tied together in a row. This event was tons of fun since it involved the most falling. The girls then had a basket toss competition. I helped make those bean bags that they're throwing. Afterwards, the boys had a huge, fierce tug of war.

After lunch, there was a cheering competition. Some san-nen-sei from every team made up chants and singing/cheering. They practiced really hard. School was so loud while they were all practicing. I recorded very low quality video of all the cheers, so feel free to watch. Green Yellow Blue Orange Red While figuring out who won that competition, we had roughly 700 more relay races. They just wouldn't stop with the relay races.

The event ended with the students marching once again, more speeches, bowing, and stretching.

I recieved a lot of questions as to whether we have sports festivals/jump rope/tug of war/whatever in America. I have to say, this was a very interesting Japanese custom.

The rest of my pictures from the sports festival are here.