Be True to Your School

On Friday we enjoyed yet another special day at school, Game Day for club sports. Three times a year, all sports teams spend the day (or whole weekend for some) competing against other schools in our block/region. This means that students are obliged to go to clubs at least 6 days a week, all year long, to 'maybe' play in three real games a year. And spectators are few and far between. Friday was the fall term competition (there wont be one in the winter) and the first games without the third year players, who are kicked off the teams after the summer term to give them more time for studying and high school prep.

I may not have made it around to all the sports (I was particularly sad to miss soccer and baseball which some of my favorite students play) but I was fortunate enough to see some Kendo and Judo at Echigawa JHS and also to cheer on our basketball teams at Hatasho. I even returned Saturday and spent the morning and much of the afternoon watching the completion of the tournament in which both our girls and boys teams took first!!! Woohoo! Besides learning team cheers and enjoying the japenglish words used frequently in sports (shooto, rebundo, etc), i also got to spend more time with the students outside of class and had alot of fun. And in the end it was a great way to spend Friday, with no class, no wasted time at my desk reading Anna Karenina, or looking at the clock.

Kendo is pretty intense and i love to watch it, even if i have no clue what the rules are or how to tell when they score. On the top is the adorable girls kendo team. Most of them are pretty quiet in class but sooo sweet. On the bottom Gen, a first year boy that is pretty active in English, is kicking another boy's butt. Woohoo!


Here are my judo girls. They rock the world and, in the less biased words of Shannon, annhilated the other girl judo-ites.


The girls bball team was pretty fabulous. They won their first game about 80 to 27 so even the new first years got to play. My favorite part of the whole thing was whenever there was a time our or a break between periods, the 2nd string girls would jump up to give their seats to the players, pass out their water bottles and towels, and start fanning them like slaves. Pretty sweet.

Boy's bball. Their warm ups were way fun and accompanied by chants that i could kind of say, and according to one of my english teachers, mean absolutely nothing in Japanese or any other language. On the bottom the team and coaches (Oota Sensei standing and Ikeda sensei sitting on far right) watch the game. I think there were 18 players on the boys team and during the two big games on Saturday only 7 of them actually played ever.