Sports Festival at IJHS

On Saturday, I went to Sports Festival at my new junior high school. It's quite a large school, so there were five teams: red, white, blue, orange, and peach/pink. Although I'm generally not a huge fan of Sports Day, I actually enjoyed this one quite a bit. I don't know these students well yet, but it really seemed like they were having fun, as were the teachers. I won't go into a blow-by-blow description of the whole day, but I thought I would share a few of the highlights.

In the first game of the day, the students had to do a borrowing relay. Each leg of the relay required the student to pick a piece of paper with an object on it that they had to use. Usually it was something like rolling a tire as they ran, or bouncing a basketball, but some of the slips called for the student to borrow a person. My name was on one of the papers, so I got to run with one of the girls. Fortunately she was slower than me, so I didn't have to feel embarrassed about slowing her down. I was glad that the vice principal had alerted me ahead of time to the fact that I would be involved in that race.

I don't know what the game is called, but I think one of the students' favorites is the game where the boys ride on each other's backs and try to snatch the other riders' headbands off. It's roughly equivalent to the chicken fighting game we would play in the pool, except that the rider has two extra people to help them stay up, and also they're playing on a hard packed dirt field. Surprisingly, the game usually ends without any concussions.

 Here, the boys are scouting out the other teams.

And then the grappling begins.

The most aggressive and risky games are typically reserved for the boys, but occasionally the girls get to join in on the fun. In a game they called "F-1", one girl would ride on a tire while two others pulled it with ropes. They had to race out to a cone, go around it, and come back. This was a relay, so it was repeated a number of times. Some of the girls simply sat on the tires, while others chose to ride them in a squatting position like jockeys. 

The game that still makes me wince when I see it is one where a boy has to climb a rather tall bamboo pole held in place only by a group of his teammates. There is absolutely nothing securing the pole, just the hands of several junior high school boys. To get to the pole, the climber usually has to vault off the back of a teammate kneeling just at the front edge of the group. It's an exciting event, but it still seems way too risky to me.

And in one of the most cooperative events, the entire team has to jump rope together. One team is about 25 to 30 students, mind you. I think the highest count any of the teams got to was 14 consecutive jumps, which is pretty impressive.

A really cool event I'd only seen at this school was a Yosakoi dance competition. I suppose it might not have technically been Yosakoi since they were dancing to "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen, but they were using the wooden naruko clackers, so I considered it Yosakoi. The choreography some of the groups came up with was awesome. That might've been my favorite part of the day.

After Sports Festival ended, I had some time to go home and shower before the enkai. The ALT isn't always invited to the Sports Festival enkai, so I thought it was pretty neat that they were including me, despite me being new at the school. The enkai turned out to have some competitive elements of its own. I hadn't been assigned a team for the actual Sports Festival, but for the enkai they put me with the orange team, which seemed fitting enough. My partner and I won our heat of the competitive drinking competition (two of us, drinking through straws, had to drain a glass of beer as quickly as possible) and I took 3rd place in the bread-snatching game. For that one I had to use only my mouth to catch a bread roll that was dangling from the end of a string. The challenge was that they were hanging the bread really low, so we were all crawling on hands and knees to get to it. Still, I thought I did well for never having played that game before. Also, thanks to my cunning leadership and superior balance, my team won a game where we all had to fit ourselves onto a single piece of construction paper that grew smaller with each round. This was also the first enkai I'd ever seen with a "dance battle" portion of the evening, but I didn't participate in that event. I suppose that's just as well, since I would've had to compete with a young male teacher whose pants were falling off. I think that may have been a deliberate wardrobe malfunction on his part.

The restaurant where we ate was very beautiful, but I wasn't such a huge fan of some of the food. The katsuo no tataki (Kochi's most famous dish) was really good, but there were a lot of other fish dishes that were less appealing. Like this one:

That, my friends, is a fish head. I'm pretty sure other people got more edible parts of the fish, but by chance I ended up with the head. Look at the pointy teeth! At least the eye wasn't still intact. Not being a terribly adventurous eater, I did not eat much off this plate.

The only disappointing aspect to this enkai was that there didn't seem to be an afterparty. I was looking forward to the possibility of karaoke, but sadly there was none. I always feel like I do a better job of communicating with people at the nijikai, where there's less of a formal structure and everyone is thoroughly drunk by that point. Well, maybe next time.

Next weekend I'll have another Sports Festival at my smaller school. This should be pretty fun since I know the students there and can enjoy them doing strange and often foolish things for our entertainment. I've also been invited to participate in a few events, so that sounds good.