Let’s Dancing!
August 31st, 2007 by StephOne more post on the joys of small town life. Akita Prefecture is playing host to the 62nd Annual National Sports Festival of Japan (that’s right! the sports-playing tree mascot is not a general Akita symbol as we originally thought, but is in fact Sugitchi, the mascot for this Olympic-style sporting event). Yesterday, the city of Noshiro held a rally in the center of town to celebrate the opening of this sports festival next month. This was a Big Event. What looked like the entire student bodies of at least five schools filled the streets to see a torch go by. There was music and dance-like gyrating:
After sitting around on sidewalks for half an hour, the actual “action” lasted for about two minutes. The torch went by, photos were taken, and over a thousand students made their way back through the streets to their respective schools.
The Japanese school year is one of the longest in the world, at least six weeks longer than the American school year, but many of those extra days consist of festivals and field trips like this.