Serious Fun

Thursday was sports day at Ota Girls High School.

Sure, I remember sports days from middle school. I hated them. Everyone in their drab blue on blue gym uniforms competing against each other and hoping for lame participation badges. It was a day that mostly felt like a series of standardized tests. Yuck.

In Japan, each school holds a sports festival once a year. And, it really is a festive occasion. Rainbow coloured t-shirts, music, dancing, and lots of laughter.



Mind you, the students still take much of it pretty seriously. One girl burst into tears on the track when her relay team finished in last place. Thankfully, only one student was rushed off the field in a stretcher and she was apparently fine, much to the relief of her classmates who formed a small mob outside of the school nurse’s room.

Some of the games were familiar to me: sprinting, tug of war, and three-legged races – only these were with teams of three people tied together instead of two and I hear it can get to an impressive 20-person tethered team from time to time in Japan.



Other games were totally new to me. For example, the obstacle race that included grabbing a bagged pastry with your teeth, and the game with the giant bamboo poles in which opposing teams rush to the middle of the field and try to haul as many large poles to their side within a time limit and against the efforts of their opponents. It’s fierce fun and hilarious when one student manages to out-race all the others and claim a pole totally on her own. Or, when a pole is dragged across the field with several losing team members along for the ride.



Some races are just for fun. The club relay is an event in which students run along the track while either doing their club activity or trying to represent it in some way. The entire brass band spent more than half an hour setting up to play about 30 seconds of musical accompaniment when their counterparts were racing along.



Even the tea club played an important part in the day. Their tea stand helped to keep participants hydrated with a variety of tasty concoctions.



A personal highlight for me was the concluding group dance at the end. Most school choose an international folk dance to close off the day. I understand there can be a lot of square dancing and that sort of thing. Not at Ota Girls. Imagine my surprise when seven hundred Japanese students burst into Hebrew! How could I resist joining them for a round of Mayim-Mayim? “Encore,” they yelled when the music ended. Encore indeed.



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