I remember track and field day back in elementary school. A day of friendly competition at the end of the year, with races, long jumps, high jumps, and so on for colored ribbons. After the long year was behind us, it was fun to have one short day of no school work and no pressure, save that of getting the coveted blue ribbons, though I don’t recall any hard feelings for coming in second or fifth. It was a day off that happened to be a school day.
Sports Day (Undoukai) in Japan is nothing like that. Not even for kindergarteners.
First, it’s required, even though it’s on a weekend so parents can also attend and take part. And it’s a really, really big deal. The biggest deal. We got to the indoor arena an hour early, and already the twin lines of kids, siblings, parents, and grandparents wrapped around the building and stretched through the park. Nearing two thousand people and, according to my sister-in-law, some get there at 3AM to get good seats.
What followed once inside was forty minutes of speeches from teachers, various heads of school boards, and company presidents, supposedly to the parents, but for which hundreds of little kids needed to sit through. After that came a dizzying array of hyper-organized races, games, and dance routines. There was a dance by a troupe of elementary school kids (who were talented far beyond their years) during a thirty-minute break, followed by some sort of frenzied rock-paper-scissors race for the older siblings and a milling-around-with parents dance for the younger ones. The speeches started at 8AM, and the closing ceremony ended at 1:20PM. Almost five and a half hours. The last hour had degenerated into a fascinating cacophony of crying, whining, and stubborn refusal to take part in what should have been fun games involving bouncing balls on parachutes. Who didn’t love parachute day back in elementary school? Over four hours of over-organized activities and boring speeches will kill the mood.
I don’t know what anyone expected when you take a few hundred little kids, wake them up at 6AM to travel across town, and force them to mostly wait around in front of almost two thousand strangers for five and a half hours. It was a solid lesson that most of life is taking part in activities you have no interest in.
Not that my opinion counts for anything, but if they’d just cut the extraneous speeches and other bullshit, cut down on the rigid organization of it all, and made the whole thing two or three hours long it would have been fantastic. Games pretending to put out fires and rescue disturbing dolls, or racing Shinkansen, are all things I could get behind more if I didn’t need to deal with a crying four-year-old on an over-crowded train for forty minutes afterward. And who could blame him?
It will get worse from here—the only thing that will get better will be Taiki’s ability to handle it (as of now, even with my best efforts at false enthusiasm, he’s not a fan, either). Once out of kindergarten, the elementary schools take it even more seriously, and more yet in junior high, which, from what I’ve seen, look like some of the flag-waving, choreographed performances for Dear Leader in North Korea.
Undoukai is just one of those Japanese things I’ll never be able to wrap my foreign brain around but will need to grudgingly accept once a year. Unless I plan a trip to Canada around that time every year, which is turning into a distinct possibility.