On Thursday, I wrote about the warm up for the Junten sports festival. However, after posting it to the site, nobody reminded me to wear lots of suncream, and as a result I am now incredibly burned, all along my arms and on the back of my neck. Serves me right for worrying more about taking nice photos than staying safe, I guess. Curse you new camera!

The day started with an unbearably long welcoming ceremony, which included a couple of songs played by the school orchestra, whilst the students all sat in rows and visibly cooked in the sun. I find it worrying that the school thinks the best way to get excellent athletic performance is to lightly toast the athletes, but I’m no sports coach. Then one of the most senior students came and gave a motivational speech and everyone cheered and felt very happy. Except me. I felt fairly marinated.

Once the serious part of the day was behind us, it was time to show off. The entire school is split into two teams - the red team and the white team (the colours of the Japanese flag, incase you forget which country you’re in). As you can see above, 3-3 class and 3-5 class were on the red team, whilst 3-6 and 3-4 were on the white team. I was on the red team, incase you’re wondering. The first order of the day was to have various students from each team dress up in crazy clothes and boost their team’s morale. I think that was the idea anyway. All they managed to boost was certain members of the staff’s blood pressures, based on the amount of time it took for a bunch of kids to dance to some bizarre J-pop.

The white team opted for the power rangers, with lead singing from a student who clearly liked Gary Glitter a little too much. As for my team…

We decided that the best way to strike fear into the hearts of the opponent was to have Darth Vader wear a tanktop and lead a dance troupe made up of cheerleaders, ninjas, girls dressed as Spiderman and girls dressed as Elmo from Sesame street. I have to be honest, I was not asked for my opinion as a member of the red team, but if I had been I would definitely have suggested we do a routine that involves going to the nearest psychiatrist.

Bizarre starting ceremony behind us, it was time for the class 4×400 relay. The English department did not fare well throughout this entire event. In every year of senior students, we have one class who receive extra English lessons. Even though all three classes were all on the white team, I couldn’t help but root for them, which is why I was quite upset by the results;

1st Year: Last place
2nd Year: Disqualified
3rd Year: Last place

We’ll stick to conjugating verbs, then…

By now it was blisteringly hot, and the air was utterly dry. The soil from the ground was blowing up into everyone’s faces and making everyone unhappy. It would take a fantastic event to pacify everyone. That event came in the form of the steal the stick from the opposite team game, one of the events I forgot to mention yesterday. (Mainly because I didn’t know it existed).

Basically, this event consists of a whole lot of girls from the white team and a whole lot of girls from the red team trying to steal as many large planks of wood from the centre of the arena as possible. When one pole was picked up by both teams simultaneously, a tug of war would occur, with more and more girls joining in until the writhing mass of limbs eventually crossed one of the goal lines. After four rounds, the score was tied between the red and white teams at two each.

I was confident by now that this day could not possibly get any more bizarre, but I have slowly learnt that things can always get weirder. Next up was Hat Thief game I mentioned before. This event is called Kibasen in Japanese, which roughly translates to “Horseback Duel”. I was pretty close with my analysis yesterday, although the game was much more violent than I could have imagined. The kids decided to replace tactics with swipes to the face of the opposition, which is a fair tradeoff, I suppose.

This event was the last event before lunchtime. I will write about the afternoon in a separate update tomorrow. Throughout the day, the Yosakoi performances took place, which were incredibly impressive and deserve their own update too, so you’ll have to wait two whole days to hear about them. Can you bear it?!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Gap Year, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.