We can’t handle the responsibility
The late fall brings out 運動会 season for all the school-aged kids in Japan. For those who don’t know 運動会 is a Sports Festival (Field Day for those lucky enough to grow up in the Kent School District) held every year in the fall. I’ve been to two already this year with the third and final one coming up on the 26th. For those who have had a Field Day in America, you still aren’t quite prepared for what’s in store for a Japanese Sports Festival.
In America, Field Day is one day a year. We play Tug-of-War, Cat and Mouse, Water Relay, have a couple races and then go home. It’s manned by teachers and parent volunteers all trying in vain to not let the children run amok (especially with the water games). It’s just one day, it come and goes and no one keeps score (a couple kids get ribbons for racing).
In Japan, the Sports Festival takes weeks of preparation. Teams are arranged, flags are made, cheers are learned. And there’s the practicing. They take time out of the school day to practice lining up, speeches, cheers and the more dangerous games so they won’t get hurt. Whereas the American mentality tends to go: This game is dangerous so let’s not play it, the Japanese mentality is: This game is dangerous so let’s practice.
I’ve heard cries from fellow (foreign) teachers about how much time is taken out of the school day to practice for the Sports Festival. Time that the kids should be spending in a classroom learning. I say that learning is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, the kids aren’t learning anything they’re going to be tested on later in life. No one’s going to ask them to recall the Red Team cheer or the pom-pom dance they learned in first grade. But they’re outside getting exercise, developing hand-eye coordination and learning to work together as a team. But most of all they’re learning responsibility.
The ones who prepare the school grounds, make the tracks, clean the school, and set up and take down structures aren’t parent volunteers or a gaggle of janitors, but the kids themselves. The kids carry the equipment out into the field, MC the Festival and handle everything but the starting gun (though they get to in junior high). The kids are learning that if they want to have a fun day and want everything to go smoothly that they need to work for it and that to get the best results possible it takes practice.
In the past couple weeks I’ve seen Japanese 9 year olds with more responsibility than American high schoolers get at school. And it’s sad. We don’t think to pick up after ourselves, or that the events that we go to took valuable man-hours to set up and take down. But maybe we can’t even handle that little bit of responsibility.
