校内休育大会 - Sports Day

They open the sports day –which translates better as sports festival– with much parading and fanfare. This is the 3 team leaders at Kami. Kami's a smaller school than Maruzuka so it only had 3 teams of about 100 students each.

They get pretty competitive and each team has huge arranged cheering to accompany the racing.

This was a race for the 1st years. They run to a table, have to blow up a balloon, then sit on it until it pops and tn scamper to the finish line.


This was a crazy race that involved each student being assigned a nursery school kid and fitting into a pair of shorts with them and being dragged around bollards. Here's some of the doting parents of said tiny people.


This was an event where four students would support one of their friends then they'd run around trying to steal each others head-bands. They were working on mass as a team too. It got pretty hectic and looked like a full scale war scene! All the dust was getting kicked up to shroud the most aggressive participants.


This event is called the mukade, which means centipede! The ichi-nensei tie their legs together and race around the track. If one falls - they all fall. Some of the teams had fantastic military discipline.


This was the san-nensei (3rd years) event, a massive tug of war. The kids were really giving it some, some of the rounds took some time.


One of the most spectacular parts of the day was the girls dance performance. Each team had an elaborate dance sequence that utilised every girl in the team to the funky beats of a terrible pop melody that ranged from Avril Lavigne to Daphne & Celeste to Ballroom Blitz! But when 100 girls run at you screaming it's scary...


The boys response to this was a gymnastics display thing that involved synchronised posing to a taiko drum.


Reminded me of the scene in Enter te Dragon when the camera rolls back and reveals 1000s of guys practicing drills.

Now Maruzuka! Maruzuka had a bunch of different events and a slightly different atmosphere buut much the same, and slightly insane.

This was a game where they had to gett as many beanbags into the basket as possible - cue lots of beanbags going a lot of places besides the basket.

There are a lot of team-based games and events, this was one where they had to run around and around bollards.

This is an infinitely expanded version of the three-legged race, most teams had at least one kid hit the dirt during this one, but one team was outstanding and practically sprinted every race.

They had one more split up into the various school teams - here's the kendo team. Just cool.

This was an event where one kid had to run across his team-mates as they ran ahead all the time.


And finally, the finale for the boys gymnastics - a six level human pyramid that was held until an order made everyone collapse on top of each other - mildly dangerous...