Nagashima Sports Day

Last weekend the junior high schools in Nagashima held their annual school sports day festival. Sports day in Japan is a very very important ordeal and hours upon hours of practice and preparations are invested to ensure that the big runs just as planned.

On the morning of sports day friends and relatives gather together at school to watch students compete against one another. Students are split into two teams, red and white, and for each event won points are awarded accordingly. Events including running relays, the tug of war, dancing, and cheering are all part of the students sports day.

There are judges too, a combination of teachers and old men from the school board, who lounge under big tents drinking tea and eating snacks deciding amongst themselves which team has the most fighting spirit. Eventually, the mayor comes by for a visit and at that time the event is put to a halt while the mayor gives a long and drawn out speech about the importance of sports day. The moms of the students run around snapping photos and taking video of their children while the dads sit on the sidelines dinking potato shochu until they can't stand up strait.

Sports day is an all day event. For lunch everyone breaks and all of the student's families spread out tarps and blankets eating picnic style together in the field - called the grand in Japanese -enjoying a leisurely lunch. At about 3:00 when the event is over, several speeches are made, the Japanese flag is lowered from the flag pole, and banzai is yelled loudly - a traditional Japanese explanation meaning, "ten thousand years" - in unison three consecutive times as hands are raised high to the sky.

After everyone cleans up together the families return home together to continue celebrating late into the evening. The teachers too gather together and go out to eat celebrating all the hard work they invested in their school's sports day festival.

The school I went out to dinner with had a charter bus come pick us up and take us to our destination. We had our party at ABC Hotel, a hotel about 40 minutes from Nagashima Island. Those of us who needed to shower went into the hotel bath and bathed together washing up for before dinner. Yup, getting naked with your co-workers, sexes separated of course, is a great way to get to know one another, not to mention totally acceptable in Japan. Finally, once everyone was ready we all gathered together at the hotel and raised our glasses for the first stage of our evening. In the end sports day in Nagashima was a true success.