Japan part 3

10/09/2008

The weather is finally starting to cool down, the rainy season / typhoon season is finally ending, Ian and I are getting into the swing of things, and of course, the holidays are approaching (which is always fun!).

Last weekend Ian and I went on a shopping trip to Osaka. I was never much for clothes in the States; and anyone who has ever looked for pants in my size will know they are hard to find! Here, on the other hand, EVERYTHING is my size! I have never had such an easy time and I love it.

We went to a landmark mall in Osaka, which is famous first of all for being enormous and second of all for having a huge ferris wheel on top of it (which we went on!). The "Hep Five" ferris wheel is the 15th tallest in the world. Here is a website with some more information about it for anyone who is interested: http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-2763615-hep_five_ferris_wheel_osaka-i

Then this week at school we had our school's "sports day". Sports Day in Japan is NOTHING like any school-related sporting event in the US.

It starts out with all the students waving flags marching around the sports field (in a very organized fashion) according to class and grade (each grade is divided into 6 classes); and whenever they pass by the school principal all the students "heil", just like the Germans (yes really).

Then they all line up - still according to grade - across the sports field and they do warm up exercises to the "exercise song". The exercise song is a song that apparently every one in Japan knows: it is played on the radio every morning at 5 AM, and every morning there is a large portion of the population who gets up and does their morning exercises to this song.

Finally the actual sports start. There are a few of the expected ones, like the 500 meter dash, 1000 meter races and so on - however those are the minority.

The major race of the day was the "crazy race". It involves students crawling under netting, jumping various hurdles, and getting into potato-sacks to jump to the finish line.

There were several relay races too, the most interesting of which being the "crazy relay", which is kind of like a scavenger-hunt combined with a race. The students pull a card out of a hat, and then have to race to get the people/things named on the cards and bring them to the center of the field.

There was a massive tug-o-war competition, with 40 students on each side of the rope, and also a massive jump-roping competition (again with 40 students per rope!).

There was also some strange sport where two students held up giant bamboo poles with baskets on top while all the other students tried to throw balls into the baskets.

My favorite sport involves those same giant bamboo poles, but this time with no baskets on top. Instead, about 6 students hold the bottom of the pole steady, one student kneels in front of the pole to act as a spring board, and one student comes running across the sports field, jumps off the spring-board student, and climbs the bamboo pole to put a flag at the top. There are 3 groups doing this, and it is a competition to see who can get the flag up and down the poles the fastest. As you can imagine, the poles fell a few times and there were several minor bamboo-pole and jumping related injuries.

Sports day was a very very amusing day for me.