where cider meets condensed milk: Rock 'n' Roll 'n' Run in Kibikogen

where cider meets condensed milk

Monday, October 09, 2006

Rock 'n' Roll 'n' Run in Kibikogen

My town had its annual Road Race this weekend, and I finished my first 10K. I didn't run well or fast, but I had the honor of crossing the finish line with a blind guy who kept shouting "Let's GO! Let's GO!" for the last kilometre. (He ran with his sighted friend, each holding onto an end of a tea towel.) My town is home to the prefectural rehabilitation center, and there are a lot of special needs residents living nearby and working at some of the companies and factories. Thus, this event is billed primarily as a wheelchair race, and of the 1400 participants, 100 are on wheels. The last little boy to do the 3K had this neat chair where he was in a harness and could push off with his legs underneath. His dad controlled steering with a handle in the back, which gave it look of a push-lawnmower. The boy was grinning and yelling "Yatta! Yatta!" as he was inching uphill past the 10K and half-marathon start line, and all the bystanders were cheering, and I think if you listened closely you would have heard 4,000 hearts shatter like glass.

Those are some of my Kibikogen babies starting the 3K. We shared gummi bears afterwards, which they thought were the funniest sweets they'd ever seen. Sure, chocolate mushrooms and dancing bean-paste buns are normal, but bears? In a moment of political incorrectness, one of the girls bit off the legs of the bear (as we are all wont to do) and then proclaimed "I've got no legs! I need a wheelchair because I can't run!" and I felt the awful urge to laugh. Wrong place, wrong time. The kids at my small junior high school are mandatory "bo-ran-tee-ah" workers for the race, coming from the English word "volunteer", and translated back into Japanese with the meaning of "not voluntary." Funny, that. The day's awkward moment came at the onsen (bath) in the afternoon, where I ran into 5 of my elementary kids with their mothers, and 2 of them were little boys. Britt was pointing out that in US teachers can't even give hugs from the front, lest they be considered sexual predators. By that standard, I'm now the Mary Kay LeTourneau of Okayama. Looks like we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. We're in a big tub in Japan...naked.

posted by Raychaa @ 3:05 PM

1 comments:

At 11:39 AM, pallaver said…

Interesting stuff. You should watch the videos on Vicky's blog, now that's great stuff. Read my comment on her blog to find out how exciting my next two weeks are going to be, and visit my blog, put up some pictures of me playing frisbee.