Undokai: Sports Day with Military Origins

    Every parent in Japan knows it, as do most who teach in grade school academia. Undokai, which gets regularly translated as "Sports Festival," though from my personal experience in the states "Field Day" would be a more appropriate moniker, can be held in spring or fall and usually consists of a handful of events with kids running, dancing, or performing other little feats to amuse and delight the crowd of cheering onlookers.

    Admittedly, this being Japan, most "cheering onlookers" are polite parents or grandparents, sitting on picnic tarps, clapping nicely as their kid passes the baton or approaches a goal line. I'm sure in more specific and serious sports events, so-called "monster-parents" may raise some hell at or on behalf of their children, but my experience with sports festivals in Japan thus far has not included such problematic folks.

    The sports festival/field day practice stems from the Meiji era and, according to one website that is yearning to bring the awesomeness of these Japanese kid competitions to the rest of the world, was based on British sports festivals of that time.

    For those with little working knowledge of Japanese history, the Meiji period on its onset was a time of great change, from the transition away from the samurai to the adaptation of so many foreign ideas with an eye toward modernization in a way that really meant adapted westernization.

    One of these adaptations stemmed from an outdoor sports event held at an Imperial Navy college in the 1870s. Online sources aren't entirely clear on who brought the idea around but it seems that several British men may have been deeply involved in the process of creating and popularizing this event, including Admiral Archibald Lucius Douglas and Frederick William Strange. The Admiral was in Japan to help modernize the military and Mr. Strange was a sportsman turned instructor who managed to publish works detailing a number of western sports and how to play them a few years later in the 1880s. Both men lent their talents to Japan and encouraged the growth of the undokai.

    The audience for this event included Mori Arinori, a man who was very much impressed and went on to be the National Minister of Education in 1885. In the display of physical coordination, he saw a future for Japanese children and a way to instill patriotism as well as physical fitness in the nation's youth. It took a few years to catch on but once schools started including sports fields in the early 1900s, undokai became significantly more common.

    From the outside, the early stages of these sports festivals as they appeared at least in my daughter's kindergarten don't look terribly militaristic or patriotic. There is a level of cooperation and a focus on team play that isn't mirrored exactly in the American elementary school version I remember. Even though it is something that also happens within military drills, relying on the group rather than operating exclusively as an individual is such a pervasive mentality within Japanese society and culture that coming up with examples isn't exactly difficult.

    As my kid has entered elementary school, I have noticed some of the more militaristic elements coming out. Watching the event with an eye toward those aspects reveals more of the origin than I realized previously. Even the radio-led warm-up, radio taiso, can look a little like a slow-motion version of military physical training exercise. It isn't hard to imagine how relay races, especially those that rely on a pair carrying a larger object (such as a massive ball or several boxes in a small net as happened at my daughter's school), could be utilized as a skill later in the most basic of military experiences. I was struck by thoughts of my brother, who recently retired from the US military, as I saw my kid more or less standing at attention while waiting for the principal to give instructions, then marching out according to grade and into an alternative position to wait for their game to begin.

Look at them, in their nice, orderly lines.

    The refocusing of the once militaristic society after the end of the second word war likely changed how some of the games were conducted, but some of those elements still come through.

    A different and likely less intentional effect of these games was a level of growth in background feminism. The clothing of female pupils in the early 1900s in Japan was largely traditional in nature. While masculine clothing evolved into western suits and trousers somewhere along the line, women were still getting around in kimono, geta and obi, none of which lends itself well to calisthenics or practical mobility. A few women over the early years of the undokai attempted to amend these issues with athletic tunics as well as sets of bloomers, blouses and skirts, but nothing worked as well as the adoption of western sports clothing in the 1930s. Even if it was only for one day a year, young women were dashing about in practical athleticwear in Japan almost a hundred years ago.

    The inclusion of the female students in undokai and the evolution in their athletic uniform shows some growth in the social value of the female student's abilities, even as many socially ingrained problems persist for young women across of the country even now.

    If you want to know more about the history of undokai and other Japanese sports, check out this book: Japanese Sports: A History, Allen Guttmann & Lee Austin Thompson, 2001. It was quoted a lot in my research but was not easy for me to find a copy of myself.