Autumn is upon us, and in Japan that means one thing: School Sports Festival, a special event held at all elementary schools where kids run relays, do tug-of war, have egg toss competitions, perform dances that they’ve been practicing for months, and so on. Known as undo-kai in Japanese, pronounced “OON-doh-kai” and having nothing to do with the undo feature on your computer, the Japanese tradition of a special day when kids can show off their athletic abilities to their parents began in 1874 when an English teacher named Frederick William Strange organized the first “outdoor games” as a way for Japanese to learn about Western sports. Today, Sports Festivals are held across Japan, which turns out to be quite profitable for companies like Panasonic and Sony, who are all too happy to sell this year’s hot new video cameras to all the oya-baka (“parent-fool”), the word for parents who go ga-ga filming their own kids. Saturday was my daughter’s last Sports Festival of elementary school, and we dutifully gathered to cheer her on during the various events she was in. It’s an annual tradition at the school that the sixth graders treat everyone to a brass band performance of the theme to Space Battleship Yamato, aka Star Blazers, and everyone did a great job.
