Sports Day & Language Update!

Hi There!

This week's major event was Sports Day at the elementary school, so I will write about that first! Then, I will talk about language learning and, related to that, how Japan got its name!

Also, the photo album contains some shots from last weekend's bike trip to Awaji Shima. I finished up the ride on Sunday, going from the south part of the island back north and taking the ferry home.

Sports Day

I mentioned in past updates that our school had its sports day on Saturday.

This is one of several school events that require major, coordinated effort from students, teachers and school administration. Another similar event is the music festival, which typically happens in the fall. 6th grade graduation (March) and the entry and management of the first grade students are the other events that I have noticed take significant efforts from the whole school.

Leading up to Sports Day, every one worked hard to prepare.

At the highest level, the school assigned every student to one of two teams - a red team or the white team. Each grade evenly split between the colors.

I wrote in past updates that school students all have a reversible hat that they wear during gym class or during outside recess - one side is red and one side is white. So you can see what team a student is on by looking at what color hat they are wearing.

Every grade had two events that it would complete. Some grades had one competition and one group activity whereas other grades had two competitive activities.

The first graders, for instance, competed in the "ball toss" game that I showed you last week and also did a short sprint of around 50 meters. Second graders also did a sprint race and then did a hula hoop performance. Third grade did a slightly longer running race and some other activity.

Fourth grade also did a race and then a group jump rope dance set to music. 5th grade did the tug of war and a relay race while 6th grade also did a relay race and a group dance.

For all of the competitions, the teachers kept scores between the red and white teams. At the end of the competition for a grade, based on the points, the teachers would announce that either the red or white team won and that team would receive a point. There was an overall scoreboard that kept track of how many points the red team had across all grades and same for the white team.

So while competing against one another within a particular grade, the students were also competing against the other grades as well. For instance, everyone from the "red" team in 5th grade was also teamed up with students on the red team in all the other grades.

Overall, the competition came down to the 6th graders, as the red and white teams were tied going into the oldest students' competition. The white team pulled out the victory in the relay race, taking the overall "sports day" champion title.

The school had a "rehearsal" sports day on Wednesday - everyone went through all of the setup steps and competitions on that day, including all of the races. This was where I got to see how the sports day would work and figure out where to fit in during it.

That is one thing about my school with how it relates to its English teacher. The administration and my manager do not speak a lot of English, so not a lot of information is relayed to me. I have to try and figure out as much as I can on my own, such as what time certain things are occurring or what I should wear to a particular event.

It is not a big deal for me. Some schools are better than others at this. I will also find out information from time to time from my local community - other teachers all usually go through the same exact events, so sometimes we share information about how to handle different things.

The school carried out the sports day on its playground. The teachers painted a chalk track onto the dirt. There was a lot of moving cones, flags, scoreboards and other objects around the ground during rehearsal and the sports day.

Japanese elementary schools seem to be pretty serious about using white ground chalk. Like the kind you would see normally used on baseball fields in America. Our school has a whole room dedicated to bags of chalk and chalking machines. I will include a photo of that in this week's album.

This is all quite familiar to me, as being a baseball coach in America gave me a lot of experience chalking fields and caring for dirt areas.

So I fit in with the "field setup" crew - there was a handful of teachers who would help setup the playground between each competition. Sometimes changing from one grade to another required painting new lines or moving equipment from one place to another.

There was actually some in-depth diagrams posted in the setup area which detailed how the playground should be setup for each competition. Teachers would refer to it to make sure all of the proper equipment was in the right place.

Leading up to the event, I spent a lot of time with the vice-principal working on the playground each day in the afternoon. This is not something that was formally required of me, but I did it partially to try and foster good relations with teachers and the administration. Also, I do not mind the work.

One day we softened up the dirt that would make up the track area, dragging rakes across it.

Another day we spread some material around the playground that I think helped keep the dust down, or something.

Then, the the day before the sports festival, we watered down the whole playground (to help control dust) and then we did setup for Saturday's first event.

The whole event took a lot of effort from the whole school. I could definitely see the impact of the event on the school - it caused everyone, students and staff, to work hard together over an extended period of time. The nature of the events were always team based, so this helped build relationships and team work among the students.

I can also see that for teachers, it probably offered them an opportunity to develop better working relationships with one another. There are some new teachers that I could tell were nervous in the first few weeks at the school, but I think that working together through the sports festival helped them build bonds with both their colleagues and students.

Some teachers asked me if we do sports day in America. I do remember that in elementary school we did a sort of track and field day, but it was not that intense. It was just more of a day to get outside and do some running versus something that we really worked hard at preparing for.

I enjoyed seeing the sports day (both the day of and the preparation for it) as it showed me a lot of the benefits such activities have if you do them in a certain way - it will help the school develop a collaborative environment and team work skills.

Sports day was on a Saturday, so the teachers and students will have Monday off. On Monday, though, I will end up going to my other elementary school. But, I was able to take last Monday off due to how scheduling worked between my two schools.

After sports day, teachers worked together to take down all the materials, put chairs away, etc. I kind of expected it to be a shorter working day, but after we were done putting away the sports equipment, the teachers all moved on to preparing the pool area for upcoming swim lessons.

We have a pool near our school, but the pool water itself is pretty stagnant. I think it has been several years since the pool was last used (due to COVID), so the area required a lot of cleaning up.

From one thing I heard, I believe the fire department will be replacing the pool water and some sort of regular filtration of it will be happening. I am curious to see how this works this summer - how the pool is maintained and how the lessons get carried out.

Language Update

I continue to study the Japanese kanji characters. I may have mentioned in prior updates that I use a phone application that uses spaced repetition to help you learn the meaning of various kanji.

I also started attending weekly in-person language sessions. A non-profit group offers these twice a week in downtown Kobe. During it, you usually work one on one with a Japanese person who will help you with conversation or review grammar.

One thing about these sessions is that they work really hard to keep the whole session in Japanese. What I have found at some places is that when you start to struggle, they might switch to English to help you along.

But, not this place - they seem to try to keep everything in Japanese and only use English if absolutely necessary. This method is helpful and it has allowed me to build more confidence in speaking.

Related to kanji characters, I also wanted to share something I learned recently.

If you are in Japan long enough, you will learn that in Japanese kanji, Japan is written as 日本. In one of Japan's other writing systems (hiragana), it is written as にほん. Hiragana is one of the first writing systems one learns when learning Japanese (along with katakana). Then you eventually move into kanji. So you would probably learn にほん first, then later learn that にほん in hiragana can also be written as 日本 in kanji.

You can break the kanji into individual meanings.

Through my language learning application, I learned that 日 means sun. I also learned that 本 means book. So, at first, I was confused - what does Japan have to do with sun and book?

I did some research into this and found that 本 actually also means origin. That is one of the things with Japanese kanji, a particular kanji can have different meanings depending on context and/or what other kanji it is paired with.

Some kanji are fairly straight forward and they actually look like what they mean.

For instance, the kanji 火 - if you use some imagination, this kanji looks like a fire. So this kanji refers to fire and is used to write various words that involve fire.

For example, 花火 means "fireworks". The first kanji (花) means "flower" and the second kanji (火) means fire. Together, it means fire flower, aka fireworks.

So, back to 日本 and how it relates to Japan. So, we know that 日 refers to sun and 本 does not mean book in this case, it means origin. So Sun Origin.

I had heard Japan referred to as the "land of the rising sun" before but never knew why that was. Now, I learn that the kanji from Japan also refers to the sun and its origin. What is this all about?

Well, from what I found on the internet, the name originates from early interactions between Japan and China.

Japan, given its location geographically, was, from China's perspective, where the sun originated each day. China, on the other hand, was where the sun set (from Japan's perspective).

So, early emperors referred to Japan as the land in which the sun originated each day, aka the land of rising sun, aka Sun's origin. Giving rise to the kanji 日本.

Until next time,