19 September 2011
Sports Day
Posted by Roland under: JET .
First off, feel free to browse the photos (on Facebook) here: It’s the é‹å‹•ä¼š time of year
One of the big events of the Japanese school year is the é‹å‹•ä¼š (undoukai), which loosely translates to “sports day”. But this is no normal field day that you may have had in elementary school. At least from my experience, all we did on field day was go outside and play a bunch of random games (races, dodgeball, throwing a water balloon back and forth). The Japanese sports day has activities for the kids, but that only makes up a part of the entire sports day experience.
I’m not sure if there’s a set time of year that elementary schools have their sports days. I found out the middle school has their sports day in May, but all of my elementary schools decided to have theirs in September (on the same day nonetheless). So it may or may not be a fall thing for all Japanese elementary schools, but in any case, in my first few weeks of working at the schools here in Amakusa, I would discover that my morning schedule would be interrupted by the whole school going outside for a few hours each day to practice formations. I quickly discovered that all the schools were doing preparation for their sports days.
This didn’t mean they were going out to have PE, the kids would go out, practice their formations for the opening ceremonies, go through opening ceremony rehearsals, which usually involved formalities such as team introductions, warm up exercises, and speeches from both school staff and kids. It almost seemed like performance in the actual sporting events didn’t matter, as the kids would be critiqued for their performance in rehearsal, for example if they were standing up straight, paying attention, even bowing the right way or responding in a loud enough voice. I wouldn’t say they were particularly intense dress rehearsals, but the teachers would make sure students were doing it correctly. If they weren’t, the students would hear about it.
And once the students got the opening ceremony practice down, they would then have to practice their dances as well. Peppered throughout the actual sports day would be dance performances by the students, some created on their own, some that were traditions handed down year after year for that specific school. Again, the same rules about formality applied here. If the students were out of step, they would be focused on until their mistake was corrected. And finally, once that was out of the way, the students would then have to get back into formation for the closing ceremony practice.
So yes, the Japanese sports day is quite a formal experience. The students were practicing it right after summer break ended, which meant at least two weeks of practice for sports day. I don’t know if they started before summer vacation started, but it’s quite possible the students had to practice some during their summer break because some of their formations/dances seemed too complicated to learn in a two week period.
Each elementary school printed out a program for their respective sports days, which made it a little easier for me to determine my schedule the day of, since I would be bouncing from school to school to try and catch parts of their sports days. Sad I wouldn’t be able to see one school from beginning to end, but I felt it more important to see as many children as possible.
The sports days are big events, not just for the school, but probably more importantly for their respective communities. Amakusa is not a big city by any means, so each sports day had a very community oriented feel. Most people know each other in their school neighborhoods. Their children go to school with their neighbors’ children so it is also a important community building event. This is helped by the fact that the sports day with inevitably incorporate events that include not just the elementary school children, but graduated children who are now middle schoolers (there seemed to be a middle schooler relay at every sports day), parents of the children, and even local kindergarten kids who will be entering that elementary school once they leave.
This is definitely not just going outside and throwing a water balloon around. But aside from all the formalities, it was in essence, just elementary school kids, divided into two teams, doing their best to help their team win. From all the tired faces I saw of children during the sports day practices, it would be easy to think that the children were not looking forward to the actual day. But when I saw them in action, running, throwing, jumping, and pulling as hard as they could, I could see they were doing what children do best, which is have a good time.
And don’t worry friends, I also got involved too. As I said the sports days were neighborhood events, so at the school closest to my home, there are several neighborhood events built in which the different communities take pretty seriously. Unfortunately, my area didn’t win at the neighborhood competition, but that’s just something to look forward to next year.