Greetings from Aspen’s Sister City of Shimukappu, Japan! My name is Grayson Bauer, and after having lived in the Roaring Fork Valley since 2015, I was lucky enough to become the English Exchange Teacher here this past spring. In the event that you just learned that Aspen has a sister cities program or that Shimukappu invites valley residents to help teach English, I would invite you to visit aspensistercities.com to learn more!
As the Summer Olympics closed in Paris, sports season has likewise wound down here in Shimukappu with the hosting of the last of a series of five school and community-wide sports festivals known as undokai (oon-dok-eye).
Similar to a field day or elementary Olympics, these are morning-long events dedicated to physical competition. Unlike the chaotic field days of my youth, with the teachers barely hanging on to their sanity during the last weeks of school, Shimukappu’s undokai are highly-structured and choreographed events, replete with singing, dancing, close-order drill, and speeches from the mayor. Held on weekends, parents not only attend but, like Aspen’s 4th of July parade, jockey to set up camp chairs in prime locations along the sidelines in the early hours of the morning.
While the two sports festivals hosted by the primary schools were fun to watch, the real shows were put on by the preschoolers at their undokais. The little tikes’ attitudes appeared to run the gamut from bewilderment to apathy, to a ruthless determination to crush the competition, all of which came off as adorable given the utterly silly nature of the games. If you have ever witnessed the chaos that is a U-6 sporting event, then I’m sure you can imagine the spectacle I was treated to. There were moments where players ran off the field in tears, collapsing into their mothers’ arms and more than once when a spectator … err, parent … interjected themselves into the field of play to attend to ouchies. The crowd of parents and community members laughed, gasped, and may have shed a tear here and there through the proceedings, with perhaps the most poignant moment coming as the rookie class of the two infants born in the last year was introduced, and their mothers carried them gently through their first ceremonial “race.”
The fifth and final undokai was for all ages and finally allowed yours truly to participate. Apparently, despite my 18-month-old level of proficiency in reading and speaking Japanese, I was disqualified from the previous four events for such frivolous technicalities as being “too old” and “not enrolled in the schools.” (For the record, I would like to state I would have dominated). Teams were organized by neighborhood, and the sports were generally aimed at different age groups, allowing everyone from the very young to the very old to participate. At the conclusion of the event, the neighborhoods retired to their respective community centers for a well-deserved meal, to hang the awards they had received on the wall, and to congratulate each other with hearty (and increasingly boisterous) toasts of “kanpai!”
While I would like to report that Shimukappu is a snippet of average Japanese life, this is far from the case. My fellow celebrants assured me (or perhaps better worded, dissuaded me from assuming that such events were normal). Shimukappu, with its 1,300 residents is the exception and not the rule in Japan. Most communities are simply too large to allow for an all-city undokai. Our population density of 2.2 people/square kilometer is 1/27th that of Hokkaido, which is the least densely-populated prefecture in Japan and is 1/153rd as densely populated as Japan at large. Shimukappu has continually struggled to hire enough workers for a number of reasons, namely, a general migration of people from rural areas to cities and Japan’s decreasing population.
So, much like the Roaring Fork Valley, immigrants are a critical component of the community. In fact, over 10% of residents claim a foreign residency card (myself included), which is Japan’s highest.
Perhaps then, this is the message of my dispatch: While the differences between our communities are great, nothing unites us more than our mutual love of sport for the sake of sport, regardless of where we come from.
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