As an aside, they tend to be very afraid of freckles and tanning here, and women will cover up more during the summer than the winter! Lots of long arm gloves, hats, and umbrellas, and fewer short skirts and leg-baring garments. Strange. Even stranger is that the sunscreen is amazingly expensive and comes in tiny containers. Umbrellas are everywhere when the sun is out.
Back to the Sports Day. It began with a group exercise. The entire school was lined up, and everyone did the exercises. There is a set exercise regimen; they all knew which exercises to do when. Very basic stretches, each one held for a count of eight, and done pretty quickly. There were speeches, because nothing can be done without a speech here, and there was loud music played all day. We were out on the soccer/baseball field. Another aside: Japanese sports fields (soccer, baseball, what-have-you) are dirt, not grass, not turf, but plain old dirt. Odd. /Aside.
The games they played were pretty interesting. One was a team Tug-of-War where the teams started at opposite ends of the field, and about 15 ropes were in the center. When the whistle blew, they had to run and bring back as many ropes as possible, leading to huge fights over the last couple. There was a capture the flag game with teams of at least 20 students. There were four students per small group, and three held up the fourth who had a flag taped to his back. The one being held up, like chicken but with three people as the base, would try to grab the flag from the other students being held in a similar manner. Once your flag was gone, your group was out of the game.
There were multiple relay races, and in one of them, students had to pick up slips of paper that listed a specific teacher or staff member, or described one, like a married professor, or in my case, a pretty female professor. The staff member had to run, holding onto the students hand, to the end of the field. Very different, yet lots of fun! There was a multi-legged race where first there were two people, then there were four, and it kept going up until there was an 11-legged race for the finish line. Some groups were really well coordinated, and others bit the dust. Literally. Some of the relay races included sack races, obstacles, and other aspects to make it interesting, like fishing for candy in a tub of flour using only your mouth.
The kids played each game for points. Different games were worth different amounts of points, and instead of being differentiated by grade, the students were in teams by major. There are three majors here, mechanical, electrical, and computer, so three teams competing for points. They had many games that required many players, and all of the relay/obstacle course races had large teams. Obstacle courses would be run I think eight times by eight students from each major, and I believe they would get points based on the ranking of each individual runner. I'm still not sure how the point system worked. The mechanical engineers won by a fair amount though, so that was nice.
All in all, it's nice to see that the Japanese have something like the American school Field Day, and interesting to note that while Field Days are typically for elementary or maybe middle schools, even the high schools get a Sports Day here. The games are a mixture of things you'd see in America, like relay races, obstacle courses, sack races, and Tug-o-War, but also a few things you'd never see in America because the legal system would eat you.
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