This past weekend our university hosted a sports festival called Yui Cup, which was a competition between all the floors in the Yui international dorm. Sports days at schools in Japan are a very common competition to raise morale and bring the school closer together. Kansai Gaidai’s sports day consisted of dodgeball, scavenger hunt, ball toss, and a relay race. I had a lot of fun competing with my dorm members from floor two and I’m very glad I got to experience something most Japanese people experience at some point while growing up.

Dodgeball in Japan is slightly different than it is in the USA for a number of reasons. The main one being that there is only one ball between everyone on the court. Also, once you are out, you have a chance to get back in by hitting the other team with the ball from the outside. The ball toss game is a staple during sports festivals, and it got very competitive. In Japanese it is called Tama Ire and it consists of a team standing outside of a circle and throwing balls into a basket on top of someone’s head who is inside the circle. Whoever gets all the balls into the basket the quickest wins, so it is fast paced and it gets very hectic. The relay race was definitely the highlight of the day because it was the last event, and everyone was cheering each other on.

It was a fun and competitive day that gave us all a little taste of Japanese school culture and there was the added bonus of my floor winning. There were four floors that participated in the event and floor two(the floor that I am on) ended up with the most points by the end of the day.