8. It's raining men! (aka sports and alcohol)

      My last two weeks at school have consisted of a lot of sitting around combined with awkwardly trying to find some way to be helpful.  There were no classes the second week of school, which meant that the students practiced for sports festival about 9 hours a day.  The majority of this time was actually spent practicing how to march out to each event in a coordinated manner.  This was especially evident in the introduction to the event, when 130 middle school kids marched in step around a track, then formed up in a very militaristic marching pattern in the center carrying four flags (one for each team, one for the school, and one for Japan).

     Most of my time during this week I alternately sat in the bleachers watching the kids practice, or I moved around equipment that for some reason was stored in high places that nobody else could reach.  I occasionally got to fire the gun to start races.  My favorite was watching the kids practice, because I got to see them try the games before they were any good at them.  Here are some of my favorite events:

Centipede racing

This is where 6 kids line up as if they're in a chain gang and have their ankles tied together with bicycle innertubes.  They then get in a conga line and race each other.  People didn't actually fall down as much as I would have liked, but when they did it was spectacular.  I can't post pictures of my students, but here is an image that I shamelessly stole from the internet.

Nobody actually got hurt too badly from this at my school so I'm not a terrible person.

17 person 3-legged race

This was probably my second favorite.  It's exactly what it sounds like.  17 girls line up side-by-side, tied together tightly at the ankles, and then try to navigate a slalom course at high speeds.  This never goes well.  They have to count in to start, which involves all of them jumping up and down and chanting, which is funny in itself.  Then if one girl hesitates a little, or if they have slightly different ideas on how far each leg will step, the whole chain has to stop.  If they stop at different times, then everyone falls over.  It's hilarious.  Then they have to shuffle to get back in position, which usually means that other people will fall down in the process.  It can take several minutes for a hundred meter course with a few difficult turns.

35 person jump rope

This is just lining a ton of people up and getting them to jump in unison over a giant jump rope.  The teachers have to coach the kids here, because they've seen this year after year and they know what works and what doesn't.  The rest of the festival is run by the kids.  Each class has to jump over the rope as many times as they can in 2 minutes.  The first years have never done this before, and they have 35 people in their class.  They got 3 times in two minutes.

Tamaire (ball toss?)

In this, you take a basket, and put it on a pole that is about 20 feet tall, then you give the teams of about 65 students a ton of soft(ish) balls and a 2 minute time limit.  This consists of a storm of balls being tossed not very skillfully (and often not even high enough) and landing on the faces of the people on the other side of the pole, who are also tossing balls into the basket.  I held the pole up on the actual day of the event for the parents round (twice as many people - two parents per kid), and I am still traumatized from how many times I got hit in the head and shoulders.

imagine this but with 65 students per basket, and a way larger supply of balls.  It looks like confetti from far away.

 Human Pyramid

  This is far and away my favorite.  Human pyramids in the US, I realize, are insanely boring and safe.  I've never done one higher than three people high.  They do have a section where they do three people high pyramids, but they jump into them in less than a second from everyone lying down or crouching.  Our human pyramids are also very limited in that they are two dimensional.  The students at my school did have some two dimensional pyramids, and they got up to five people high, which takes 15 people.  The secret there was climbing up from the side rather than the back, and being very organized so the pyramid could be built quickly.

But wait, you say.  Don't the kids get hurt and fall down?

Yes.  All the time.  So many kids fell down from the top I felt that it was raining men during pyramid practice (hallelujah!).  However, they actually never got hurt from that.  One kid did somehow manage to dislocate his shoulder from being on the bottom for too long.  Of course they never considered stopping.  There was a five high human pyramid built in a circle with the top three levels standing up, which was crazy.  The finale was a 7 person high pyramid with a triangle base.

This looks almost exactly like the one at my school, except they were all boys and wearing blue shorts.

On Friday after school, I was told many of the teachers would go to "take a bath" together, so I decide to join them.  We have a staff party planned for Saturday, but I thought it couldn't hurt to get to know some of the teachers beforehand.  So us males go to a Japanese public bath, and wash ourselves together for way longer than I thought necessary.  We go into a hot tub, sit for a while, and then come out and take a sitting-down shower next to each other.  As one of the teachers makes sure to point out, we all have penises.  We also go into another bath with flavored tea water, which apparently is invigorating for my pores.

     After the bath, we go to a traditional Japanese restaurant where I am again caught in a no-chair situation.  I only have about 40 minutes of cross-legged sitting in me, and stretching my legs out under the table causes me to accidentally get to know my coworkers a little too well.  Halfway through the dinner, my coworkers decide that I should "sit between the beautiful women."  Thinking they were joking, I laugh, however I was eventually told by everyone again to please stand up and go over there.  So I did.  Everyone's always looking out for my best interests here I suppose.  I drove to this event, so I am not drinking because in Japan it is illegal to have even one beer and then drive.  However, some of the other teachers are getting quite sloshed.

A sloshed teacher in his natural habitat.

After we leave the restaurant, somehow everyone decides that it is a good idea to pick up some beer at a convenience store and go back to the middle school to drink it.  We then proceed to sit at the same desks we are all at during work, and finish the beer that we bought.  The vice principal is even sitting at his position at the head of all the desks, so it feels vaguely like a morning meeting, except that one of the teachers just threw up in the students' bathroom.  He decides to sleep in the teacher's lounge, and is ready to roll for Sports Festival the next morning at 7:00.  Way to hold it together, teaching staff.

When actual Sports Day comes, everything pretty much goes as planned.  Blue team wins, probably because they have this excellent banner:

It looks surprisingly angry considering its wings are made of rainbows.

 After the sports day, we have another staff party, which it turns out involves another bath.  I am so clean.  This is an expensive event, and the dinner that we eat is served on two million plates, each with one slice of pickled vegetable on it.  We are being served by women wearing the traditional yukata (what we think of as a kimono - I'll try to keep the pretentious italics to a minimum).  One thing that I think is pretty cool is this basket.  It has a flame underneath it, and when the flame runs out, that means that it is done cooking.  Unfortunately, its contents turn out to be one mushroom.

It was a good mushroom.

     During the dinner, everyone gives a speech about how they thought the Sports Festival went.  Unfortunately everyone sits in Japanese tea ceremony style (sitting on your ankles) during these toasts.  After the first two, I am told by the guy next to me that if I have to make that face when I sit like that, then I should find a different way to sit.  Also unfortunately, this toast thing includes me.  After a few sentences in attempted Japanese, I am informed that I should just speak in English, and the English teacher will translate.

     After the dinner, I am about to get a ride home with the one of the older teachers, when someone runs out and pulls me out of the car, and informs me that I am not done drinking yet.  The younger teachers and I go out for beer and dumplings, which turns out to be delicious.  I have a great time, and I desperately wish I could speak better Japanese to be able to fit in and understand even basic questions directed at me.  I am definitely going to enjoy working with these people.

As a closing note, these are some bathroom slippers I saw at the staff party:

Greenpeace isn't my favorite NGO, but I wouldn't make a slipper about it.

Picture Credits:

Darrell McIndoe, Flickr

 spotlight-media.jp

katrinainjapan.wordpress.com (someone who had my same job, but didn't feel an obligation to comply with rules about posting pictures of students)