Hidemi's Rambling No.365

It’s a season for a field day at school in Japan. Students have rehearsed the various events for a month or more. Parents are invited to a field day to cheer and bring lunch for their kids. Popular events are the 100-meter dash, an obstacle race, a tug-of-war, and a relay race. Among them, there is one weird competition. Students play on opposite sides of a red team and a white team, to throw small balls into a basket. Parents are required to sew the ball out of cloth beforehand and the school collects them for the event. In the competition, the handmade balls get scattered around a pole at the top of which has a wooden basket. With a signal, students dash to the balls all at once, pick them up and shoot them at the basket. Then teachers count the balls inside the baskets of both teams out loud, and the team with more balls in the basket wins. Besides this, there are other strange team events. A mock cavalry battle that a student wearing a cap is carried by two students who run around to get opponents’ caps, a composition exercise that students form certain shapes with their bodies as a group, and a dance by the whole classes. They need a lot of rehearsals because of those team events. All students must participate in a field day that comes every year until they graduate from high school…