Earlier this month I was invited to participate in something called undokai by one of my elementary schools. In English this is called “Sports Day”, although I can guarantee that’s a translation of the intent, not the actual kanji. Every elementary and junior high school in the country holds one, as well as several cities on a larger scale, and the foreign teachers are often invited to participate. I had previously missed the official Osakikamijima undokai in the fall, so when I was asked to join in, I leapt at the chance to hang out with my students outside of school.

I arrived early on Sunday to help the teachers set up the spectator tents and chairs, since most of the island population is older and can’t sit in the summer heat for too long. The day officially kicked off at 10:00, and it became immediately clear just how different this was going to be from the sports days I remembered from North American schools. We opened with an almost military procession of the students and teachers around the track, then an incredibly formal presentation of the trophy that would be given to the winning team (white hats vs. red hats), then a very somber speech from the principal asking everyone to try hard and do their best,

in true Japanese fashion. We ended with what I am now dubbing the “Japanese Warmup,” a series of movements and not-quite-stretches that I suppose are meant to loosen you up before exercise. What makes it fascinating is that it is set to the exact same piece of music every time it is performed. As I write this I can see a kindergarten school across the street practicing for their own undokai and doing the same warmup to the same music.

What pushed the warmup from quirky to unreal is when I turned around and saw that the parents and grandparents of the kids were doing the exact same movements at the exact same time! This warmup has been taught and rehearsed for decades, and I can only assume the music causes some kind of Pavlovian response in Japanese people where they are compelled to get up and exercise.

Finally, the “sports” began. I put that in quotation marks because, despite the event being called Sports Day, they don’t seem to actually play any sports. They have a lot of the kinds of bizarre games you play in elementary school; roll a big ball around a track, throw bean bags into a basket, that kind of thing. The students also performed some kind of dance that I’m not even sure how to describe; it involved decorated hats they held like shields and a lot of jumping and yelling, and it was way longer than I would have expected elementary kids to have the patience to remember.

As a teacher, I got to join in with the PTA events, where a group of teachers and parents would compete instead of students. There were only two, a tug-of-war and something called “Nice Catch” where you have to use a basket on a stick to catch a ball volleyed by your partner. I was able to beg my principal not to make me participate in their traditional folk dancing; she said no one needed any practice, but considering the students had been rehearsing for this for weeks, I was more than a little skeptical.

For most of the day I got to run around and take as many pictures and videos that I could. After a break for lunch, we got to the final events; the big ball race, croquet target practice for senior citizens only, and the only thing I would have called a sport, the relay race. Four hours later, we closed off the day by awarding the trophy to the winners (the white team, if I remember correctly), having more speeches from the principal and people from the board of education, another Japanese Warmup, and another march around the field before we tore down every sign of there ever being a Sports Day on the field.

To be honest, watching it gave the impression that it was less of a competition and more of a performance. The students weren’t actively trying to win the games so much as displaying their abilities to play the games as well as they could. Marching the students on and off the field after every event, the training all of the students and parents and teachers had to go through, and the expectation of discipline underlying the entire day gave it an almost military feel.

Many of the principals and managers from other schools and the Board of Education were invited to watch, and our principal spent far more time entertaining them than paying attention to the activities her own students were doing. Certainly, as the principal that’s kind of her job, but it just heightened the feeling that the real purpose of undokai was to display their training to the other schools, who of course had their own undokai a few weeks later. I checked, and they do all of the exact same games in almost the exact same order. But if the students, teachers and parents are all part of the performance, then who is the real audience? I find it hard to believe, even for Japan, that the whole day is for the benefit of the top brass at the other schools on the island.

I can’t even do the day justice through words alone, so I’m working on making a video of the opening ceremonies and the other strangeness I got video of throughout the day. And for the record, I totally kicked ass at the games I participated in. Go Red Team!

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