Sports day rehearsal

Every year in Jr.High School Japan has Sports Day
It's a day in which students come together to take part in various physical activities as grade blocks compete. A few days before the actual event students must begin practicing for the events. These practice days are during the school week and thus classes are canceled. (Good news for everyone!) The actual event day isn't until this Sunday, but rehearsals give a little taste of things to come. Hopefully those things don't include all the warm up/drills the students had to do. It's a very rigid structured rehearsal. One teacher came up to me and told me the structure hasn't changed since quite a long time ago and that in his opinion it seemed less like a festival and more like the army. While watching rehearsals I can see why he would think that. Before the students did any actual practice for the events they had to listen to a lot of talking and take part in synchronized exercises.


The loud speakers blare what sounds like it could possibly be post World War 2 jingles. (It's so structured it almost looks like Japan is using these rehearsals to prepare an army. haha)But seriously its quite interesting to see hundreds of kids all doing the exact same excercise.Of course with the exception of the clerical things and other jobs that take place in the teachers room everything in Japanese public schools is very organized. (Too bad I can't often say the same about the teachers.) After half a day of military training they finally got around to practicing some actual sports for the events. Some of these sports included relay, an obstacle course run and group jump roping which is basically an entire class of students all jumping rope at the same time together. The last being one of the most interesting to watch. Rehearsal also includes a lot of banging of the taiko drum and some other things I can't quite explain. At one point nearly all of the guys at the school took off their shorts and formed to large groups on opposite sides of each other. After some chants they proceeded to run towards each other. I didn't understand the meaning of this and thus it appeared even stranger. They looked like the wolf pack guys from the Twilight movies.



So in the end it finally began to look like students were having fun and thus I began to as well even though I only was able to sit out in the sun and watch. The actual Sports Day is coming up and I will probably attend so there may or may not be a blog about it.