The Stars Of Track And Field

In early spring, Japanese children of all ages can be found lacing up their running shoes, carefully painting banners and practicing complicated dance routines. Spring is undoukai season in Japan and schools everywhere are rife with excitement leading up to the yearly sports festival.

I was invited to attend three separate sports festivals this year but due to schedule conflicts, I was only able to make an appearance at one. Having accepted the invite, I considered it my official duty to show up in a timely manner. After all, the sports festival would probably amount to little more than a few kids running around in the dirt and the absence of the town’s resident foreigner would surely be noticed.
Well, you can imagine my surprise when I showed up at Momoishi Elementary School on a Saturday morning (about an hour late and still recovering from a night out in Hachinohe, as can be expected) to find tents, announcers and literally hundreds of people. It turns out that the sports festival is probably the biggest event held by the school every year and family members show up in droves to cheer on their offspring.
As this is Japan, the front lines were filled with expensive optical equipment: the latest handheld camcorders, digital SLRs and telephoto zoom lenses were all on prominent display. It almost seemed more like a digital photography convention than a sports meet.
So, why all the fuss over a few kids running around? After all, this is only elementary school and the festival is really more play than serious competition. Well, the short answer is that sports, in general, are a big deal in Japan. From nationally televised high school baseball games to round the clock World Cup coverage (centering exclusively on team Nippon, naturally), sports are an inescapable aspect of Japanese life.

The reasons for this are complex to be sure and without getting too academic, we can entertain at least one easy answer: that sports and the Japanese national psyche are somehow inextricably bound. The best and perhaps most oft-cited example of this is the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which, as summarized by film scholar Yoshikuni Igarashi, “symbolized the full acceptance of Japan back into the international community”. This healing of a wounded national identity is a process that may continue to this day, as recently asserted (warning: annoying invented terms abound) by Pop Matters staffer tjm Holden; “It is through sports that Japanese tend to measure their progress as a nation among the world of nations”.

So how does the comparatively lowly undoukai fit into all of this? Well, at the most basic level, the school sports festival can be seen as a microcosm of the international athletic competition; a small-scale reenactment of the type of event that Norma Field has cited as being “enormously effective” at promoting confusion between pride for one’s nation and nationalism. As the flags above attest, a sports festival need not actually be an international event so long as it is staged like one-the undoukai realized as an exercise in national pride on the local level. After all, every Japanese child is a potential Hideki Matsui or Nakata Hidetoshi-a fact that’s certainly on the minds of at least a few shutterbug parents as they patiently wait to line up that perfect shot.
I imagine that by this point, you’re probably anxiously asking yourself, “what actually goes on at a sports festival?” Well, the festival I attended was essentially set up as an exhibition of athletic prowess by the various grade levels. Each grade would first treat the audience to some sort of entrance performance. Here we see the third graders marching in file and swinging their arms, like all good soldiers do.

Then, they pretended to be airplanes or something?

Finally they performed a dance number. Shake it like a Polaroid picture!
After finishing their dramatic entrance, each class competed in a relay race. While there were many events in the undoukai, the relay race seemed to be the central competition of the festival.
Finally, after completing the race, a student from the grade would be presented with a flag by a representative from the school board. Following the requisite amount of cheering, the next grade would enter and the process would repeat itself.
Aside from the central events, the festival also featured a number of "wacky" events. Like the “teachers filling up empty sake bottles with water” race…
…or the tarp race. Please don’t ask me how this works because I have no idea whatsoever.
Here we see the new superintendent of Oirase Town straight chillin’ with the fine ladies who would lead the halftime show.
Before breaking for lunch, the entire school performed some sort of old lady dance, led by a group of authentic old ladies. Good thing there were so many spectators at the undoukai, I was able to slip away undetected after all.