Sunday: Part 1

So this past weekend was the Sports Festival for my Junior High in Shinji. Its hard to explain exactly the gist of sports day, but here is my best interpretation. It is an opportunity for the entire student body, in this case 270+, to put on public display their health, creativity and athleticism. They do such by splitting into 3 teams and through various events, by which they either "race" or are ranked, to receive points in hopes of winning THE coveted "Sports Festival" trophy.

The kicker....the whole entire event is planned and coordinated by a small group of the 3rd year (think 8th grade) students.

This small group started preparations back before school started and had every afternoon of this past week to get everyone else up to speed. The events were various to say the least. Tug of war, relay races, 6-legged race and my absolute favorite was the group dance (just wait). There were a whole days worth of events but to be honest, I cant figure out how to describe them without writing a short novel.

In addition to all of this, we had a typhoon approaching. The weather for sunday, Sports Festival, called for a 90% chance of rain. I was figuring there is no way they're going to go through with this...but I figured wrong. And you know what, it was dang near a perfect cloudy day.....minus two small downpours.


So, imagine that you are 13 years old. This is your first year of Junior High, and 2-3 of the popular girls in your school were given the power to make you learn some super silly looking moves and then make you do them to music while you had to pretend to be having fun. Oh, and you are required to sing to popular music, loudly....and eventually preform it in front of everyone you know wearing what can only be described as props.

This is the group dance described in a nut shell and another great example that how even world wide, some things are just consistent. The final presentations on sunday were great and really impressive, but watching the practices they had prior to sunday will be memories I carry with me forever. Bless their hearts, the girls put a lot of effort and work into choreographing the songs they chose.....and the other girls, almost all of them, got into it as well. As for the boys, well....different story.

Say one part of a song would call for a great sweeping of the arms to the sky like some kind of yoga move, the boys would just flick their wrists in the appropriate direction. If they were supposed to scurry hurriedly from one area to another, the "too cool for school" boys would shuffle their way just fast enough so as to give the impression they were trying. And this drove the girls in charge absolutely crazy mad. Their retaliation in return would be to make everyone, with special attention towards the guys, stand still and sing at the top of their lungs the pop songs until the words were engraved in memories. (I can even sing parts of them now) One of the songs had some "hey Ricky your so fine..." lyrics in it....priceless.

I tried not to laugh, because I am not able to explain exactly what I find funny...but man I couldn't help it. Come day of the big performance, the first group up, blue, they were no more than 5 words into the first song when the heavens opened and dropped a minute and a half of hard water. We, the teachers and families, were all under canvased awnings. The kids, well they just rolled with it and it was great.