Oct 8, 2017

Sports in the park

Sport forms a very important part of life in Japan. On this day there was a soccer tournament for what looked like junior high school students. At least two or three times a month there are tournaments of some kind in the park. For school age kids, there are baseball and soccer tournaments and for adults there are ground golf, gate ball, and petanque competitions. Petanque is the French version of the game of bocchi ball which was popular in the eastern part of the US when I lived there. I am playing in a tournament next week so I will go into detail then.

The ground in the park can be reserved by groups. I play ground golf on the far half of the field twice a week and other groups use the space for practicing various sports.

In this picture, you can see two soccer games in progress, one in the foreground and one on the far side of the field.
 One feature of these tournaments for kids is that the parents come and set up tents. They eat and drink tea while watching their kids play. There are also kids whose team is not playing at the moment running around.

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