Life In Japan: Sports Festivals

Above is the annual sports festival at a local junior high school here in Sasayama. These much-anticipated events take place at every school in the country around the middle of September — even pre-school and kindergarten!

To say they’re popular is an understatement. They are as much part of the fabric of social life here as eating rice and fish.

The events at a Japanese sports festival include some “normal” sports contests, e.g. relay races, tug-of-war, team rope jumping. But they as well have quite an assortment of unique, and I have to say, quite amusing activities I wouldn’t expect to show up in the Olympics anytime soon. There’s the hacky sack basket toss, the three-legged kick-the-ball then shoot-a-hoop match, a relay race carrying a tennis ball on a tennis racket while running at full-speed around the circumference of the field.

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Sports festivals are not restricted to just students. Villages compete against one another, meaning full-grown adults also participate in the action. I can’t say the village I live in does very well in these competitions. We may have the most geriatric team in all of Japan. But we have a great time, which is mainly what these all-ages competitive events are all about.

Here’s a mercifully short video of my legendary performance at a recent community sports festival. If it’s not entirely obvious, my challenge — for which I trained with the best coaches east of Nagasaki — was to inflate a balloon, pop it by sitting on it, then scramble back to the starting line, tagging my next teammate in line, who we hoped would repeat my gold medal-level performance, and lock in first place for this epic showdown.

What can I say? It seems no matter what the season is, there’s always something going on here, and whatever it is is typically is built around some excuse for people to get together, have a good time, and simply enjoy the company of those living in the community.