Sports Day!

Once a year, Japanese junior high schools have a sports day.  It’s a sort of school-wide Olympics.  All academic activities are canceled for the day, and each class bands together to compete in the four events.  The competitions are only within grades, so you don’t have any 9^th graders competing unfairly against a seventh grade class.  In my school there are five classes for each grade.  Each class gets its own color headband to be worn throughout the day’s events.  We began the day with a brief assembly to kick off the competition, the principal giving the student body a hearty “Ganbatte!” (Do your best!).  Students then dispersed, checked the schedule posted on the wall, and headed off to their various events.  

Headbanded students stand at attention waiting for the competition to begin

There were four different events: soccer (boys), dodge ball (girls), basketball (boys), and volleyball (girls).  Due to limited gym space, only second and third year students were able to compete in volleyball and basketball.  Three soccer fields were drawn out on the dirt sports area next to the school.  At first I struggled to figure out which grade was competing on which field since students were no longer wearing their color-coordinated indoor shoes.   But I figured it out soon enough by looking at the goal posts on each field.  The first field had nice white full-sized soccer goals, clearly the home of the third year students.  Field two also had full-size goals, but these were old and pretty rusty – second year.  And the goals on the third field were composed of two small rusty practice goals pushed together for the first year students.  Not exactly egalitarian, but it does represent the idea of hierarchy that is so prevalent in Japanese culture.

Dodge ball was probably the most interesting event for me to watch.  First of all, since when is dodge ball a girls’ sport?  In America this is the sport that sees most of the girls cowering in the back, invariably ending up as the last students in play, shrieking as they get pelted by the strongest boys on the other team.  But such is not the case in Japan.  Here the girls really get into it.  And the rules are very different as well.  The game is played with a single ball.  The court is a chalk rectangle drawn on the dirt field.  If you get hit by the ball, you are out.  If you catch the ball, nothing happens.  But when you get out, you do not sit at the sideline waiting for the game to end; instead you go and stand somewhere out of bounds on the opposing team’s side of the court.  If the ball ever rolls out of bounds you can pick it up and try to throw it at an opponent.  If you hit an opponent, it not only gets the opponent out, but you get to come back in.  I like this way of playing; I think it’s more interesting than standard American dodge ball.  There’s a lot more strategy and teamwork involved.  For example, instead of just trying to hit someone with the ball, you might pass the ball to your teammate who already got out and is standing right behind the crowd of the opposing team.   It’s hard to describe exactly how the game works, but if you ever come and visit I would be glad to play a round or two with you!

Dodgeball in the foreground, with the soccer field in the distance

Basketball and volleyball were pretty standard, but still had some great competition.  Some officiating was done by teachers, but for the most part students held roles of referee and scorekeeper.  That’s something I’m coming to learn about school in Japan: everyone has a job, everyone pitches in and helps out.  Students had good sportsmanship, and although there were some tears after a particularly close volleyball match (on both sides of the net, interestingly enough), everyone worked well together.  

At the end of the day students cleaned up the sports equipment and headed back to classrooms to await the announcement of the winners.  I sat at my desk in the teachers’ office and strained my ears to pick out the standings, as the announcement was (obviously) done in Japanese.  As each event was announced I could hear the cheers and clapping reverberate down the hall from the various classrooms.  

I like this tradition of Japanese schools.  It reminded me of the annual Olympics held by my dorm in college.  I remembered how the competition brought us together and solidified our identity as a community on campus, and I think the same thing happened last week with the students at Funehiki Chugakko.  Yes, it was a day at school without any academics.  But what it achieved was equally important, and I bet students will do better at school because of it.  Maybe American schools could take a page from the Japanese book and hold a sport’s day from time to time.  Maybe if students identified with the community of their fellow students it wouldn’t be so hard to get them to come to school.  School is about more than just test scores, and I’m glad that I got a chance to see what else it might be.