The sports festival is one of the two big festivals that schools have every year (the other being the cultural festival in the fall). Generally it's just the parents that attend, but because of the falling rural population this and the other rural elementary school here are merging with the main one in town next year, so being their last sports festival they opened it up this year for all the people in the area to come. (But since I'm a teacher there I could go regardless.)
The way the competition works is that they split the kids up into three teams, red, white, and green, with a few kids in each grade on each team. Then some of the competitions between the three teams are done by grade, with the best individual getting points for their team, and other competitions are done by entire teams, all grades included. (The teams for the middle school were Chokai (the mountain), Kujuku (the set of islands that used to be here when the area was underwater), and Otori (I think a legendary phoenix, but I'm not sure its significance to the area).
The opening ceremonies started Olympic-style, with the the three teams marching around the track next to each other in three columns, led by the sixth-graders and decreasing by grade to the first-graders in the back. After stopping in front of the announcement platform, one of the sixth-graders came out with a "torch", with red pom-pom streamers on top for the flame, and ran around the track to the flagpoles and "lit" the main flame, which actually was a real fire and was lit by one of the teachers. Then they raised the flags, the national, town, and school flags.
Then the principal and PTA head each said a few words, along with some city official who was there with the town mascot, Nikahoppen. ("Nikaho" is the name of the town, the "pen" is short for "penguin", and the "hoppe" in the middle means "cheek", whence comes its bulging cheeks.) After the speeches a couple young guys in their twenties came out with a guitar and played a song. I've seen guys like this in anime before, wannabe musicians who are stuck out in the country so have no one else to play with and nowhere to play except for new store openings and the like, so I was amused to see that that's a real thing and we have our own version.
Then the games started out with each grade doing their sprint, then a couple PTA-arranged events. First, a true/false quiz where everyone stood in the field on one side of a line or the other based on their answer, and they asked questions until only the winner remained (I think it was a couple of the middle school girls who were the last standing). Then the adults split into teams based on which village they were from (plus a teachers' team that I was on) and played a ball-passing game where we all stood in a line and passed a ball alternately over our heads and between our legs, with the fastest team winning.
After that was the cheering contest, so each team had some unique cheers they had come up with, and they were scored on I think creativity, energy, and some other category.
Then there were events that the kids did with their parents, a little different for each grade, but there was always some sort of running portion, and a part where there was a bag of snacks hanging off a pole by a clip that the kids had to grab and pull off with their teeth. (The latter is a typical event at sports festivals, evolving from a bread-eating contest where it's a bun of some sort that hangs.) Then for the not yet school-aged children and the grandparents they just put some bags of snacks on the ground in a line and had them race up to grab one and continue to a finish line.
Next was the tug-of-war, which was done three times so that each team could face each other, and then something that was written in the program as "maimu maimu". It turned out to be some kind of dance done in a circle, and after the kids performed it once, they had to grab people from the audience to join them for it, with the teams with the most people getting the most points, so I got pulled in by the green team and did the dance (and we won). From the sound of the music and the few words that they were singing I thought it might be a Russian dance, so I googled it when I got home and found out it's actually a Jewish dance.
After that we broke for lunch, and when we came back they had a drum and whistle parade.
After that was another adult event, a relay where we had to run around the track with a ping-pong ball on a ladle, also divided into teams by village, with a teachers' team, so I played in that as well. Then the third and fourth graders did a sort of planting relay, where they had to put on farming clothes (boots, baggy pants, and a hat), take a wheelbarrow across the field, load it with "carrots" from a bucket, bring it back, and "plant" them.
Then the fifth and sixth graders did an event where the teams faced each other across the field where there were a few colored poles in the middle, and had to run up and grab them and bring them back over a line on their side. This was the most fun to watch because after most of the poles had been taken there would be multiple kids teaming up to pull on the remaining poles, sometimes just dragging other kids on the ground the whole way across the field, and always ending up with each entire team on each end of the remaining pole doing a tug-of-war on it.
Then they did the adults tug-of-war, by village again, but this time with no teachers' team since we'd be so outmatched in numbers. Then it wrapped up with the regular baton-passing relays.
The closing ceremony was just a few more words by a couple of the adults, and then they called on a few of the kids to give their thoughts too. This is something that they do at the end of a lot of classes in elementary school too. Sometimes they'll have a journal where they write some thoughts at the end of each class, or sometimes they'll stand up and give their thoughts instead (or sometimes they just don't do anything like that, depends on the school and class I guess). Overall the whole thing ran from nine to three.
Then the same weekend was the town festival. These festivals generally always have a shrine festival at their core which they grew out of, so aside from the shrine activities, the main attraction is a street lined with stalls with food and games, just like any other street festival. Most festivals have the same types of stalls, so the traditional games are goldfish scooping, where you use a thin paper scoop to try to get a goldfish into a cup without breaking the scoop, a game where you try to fish water balloons out of the water, and they had the old darts and balloons game too. Then all the normal festival food like yakisoba, chocobananas, crepes, etc.
It was very small, just one short street just off of the main street, but it was interesting to see. But there were also lots of my middle school students there too, so it was nice to see them outside of the school for a change.
Then the next weekend, today, was a festival out at the shrine by the elementary school called Chokurairo. It ran from about eleven to one. When I got there I saw the elementary school teachers sitting in the crowd in front of the "stage", just a raised earthen platform, so went to sit with them. Way up the stairs at the main shrine building I'm told prayers had been going on since about 9am. Based on what I know of Shinto, I assume the prayers were to transfer the spirit of the god from the main shrine into the portable shrine, which was then marched down the stairs and set up in front of the platform. Then they did some dances, I assume for the entertainment of the god. And when they were done everybody left. They must take the god back up afterwards.
You can see more videos on YouTube.
They passed around a handout with the history of the festival and a little about each of the dances, and what I can gather between it and the Japanese Wikipedia is that there was a demon around that no one could defeat so Emperor Montoku called on Jikaku Daishi to defeat it (which places this about 1200 years ago), who called on the gods of Mount Chokai and Mount Yoshino and was able to defeat it, and then the dances were performed as thanks and continue to this day.
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| Description of the festival and dances. |
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