Sports' Festival

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Had a great day today at the Mizusawa Junior High's sports festival. The kids were incredibly enthusiastic and you could tell that they had worked really hard in the lead up to today.

There were three teams: red, yellow and blue. Each team had a poster with their team animal (fox for red, tiger for yellow and eagle for blue) and their own distinctive cheer to support the ones performing. They were judged on the cheer and the poster as well as on their sports prowess.

The posters were extremely impressive - I thought they had been done professionally. And the cheers were sometimes impressive and often hillarious - and they kept at it all day long! I find the concept of a cheer to support your team - every runner, not just those who come first - a great idea, and the non-sporty kids seemed to love the cheering much more than the races themselves.

Much of the competition involved running - including a relay in the afternoon which the parents got particularly involved in! But there were a couple of odd-ball races: the second years (12-13) ran a race with a pole held by a team of 4. The team had to run up to a traffic cone, go once round it, run to a second and repeat the same thing, then run back to the rest of their team, pull the pole under their team's legs and then back over their heads before handing it on to the next team in the relay.

The first years (11-12) did an octopus relay race, which involved teams of 4 carrying an enormous papier-mache (or the like) octopus around by poles attached to the underside of the octopus. That was particularly funny since Japanese octopi are quite stylised and each team's octopus had its own funny expression.

The thirds years' weird race involved one "runner" walking over the backs of his or her classmates to a cone and then back over them. There weren't enough classmates to reach right to the cone, so once the runner had walked over your back, you had to run to the front of the line and bend over again.

Also impressive was the boys' (all years) acrobatics display and the girls' dance - the boys are allowed to join in with the girls' dance the second time round and that quite made my day as it's apparently a lot harder than they make it seem!

All in all I had a great day and the kids and parents seemed to as well. No photos, I'm afraid. It made me think, once again, what a shame it is that sports days are being outlawed in the UK - we're definitely missing out.

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