After a summer of r&r, I’m now back at school teaching again. However, to ease us back into this strenuous role, the Japanese Education Board have kindly devoted the first few weeks of term to sports and culture festivals.

Last year, the sports festival was held during a tyhpoon. A typhoon is the Asian word for a hurricane, i.e. the beast named Katrina that just trashed New Orleans. To read about having a sports day during a thyphoon check the December 2004 Archives.

The irony of this is, that last week school was cancelled for an entire day due to a tyhpoon. It’s apparently fine to be out trying to run a race in 120mph winds, where you are being sand blasted alive, and you are completey sodden by the insanely heavy downpours, but to be inside the saftey of a concrete school building during such an event is a situation far too dangerous to even consider.

It’s easy to see where those crazy enduance Japanese game shows have come from when you have witnessed a school sports day, and even more so a sports day in a typhoon. There are only a couple of events that we would call sports, the rest are just bizarre battles.

Rather than try to explain these events in words, I’ll let the photos do the talking this time.