Greetings from Aspen’s sister city of Shimukappu, Japan! My name is Grayson Bauer and after living in the Roaring Fork Valley since 2015, I was fortunate enough to be an English exchange teacher here this past spring. If you just learned that Aspen has a sister city program or that Shimukappu invites valley residents to help teach English, I invite you to visit aspensistercities.com. to find out more!

With the end of the Summer Olympics in Paris, the sports season also ended here in Shimukappu with the hosting of the last of a series of five school and community sports festivals, known as Subscribe (oon-dok-eye).

Similar to a sports festival or the Olympic Games in elementary school, these are events that last throughout the morning and are dedicated to physical competition. Unlike the chaotic sports festivals of my youth, where the teachers were barely able to think clearly in the last weeks of school, Shimukappus Subscribe are tightly structured and choreographed events, packed with singing, dancing, hand-to-hand combat drills, and speeches from the mayor. The events take place on weekends, and parents not only attend, but like the Fourth of July parade in Aspen, they fight in the early morning hours to set up camp chairs in the best spots along the sidelines.

While the two primary school sports festivals were fun, the real shows were put on by the preschool children in their undokais. The attitudes of the little rascals seemed to run the gamut from bewilderment and apathy to ruthless determination to crush the competition, all of which seemed quite adorable given the utterly silly nature of the games. If you’ve ever witnessed the chaos of an under-6 sporting event, I’m sure you can imagine the spectacle I witnessed. There were moments when players ran off the field crying and collapsed into their mothers’ arms, and more than once a spectator… er, parent… rushed onto the field to tend to Auas. The crowd of parents and community members laughed, gasped, and maybe shed a tear here and there throughout the event. Perhaps the most poignant moment was when the rookie class of two toddlers born last year were introduced, their mothers gently carrying them through their first ceremonial “race.”

The fifth and final Subscribe was for all ages and finally allowed me to participate. Apparently, despite my 18-month-old ability to read and speak Japanese, I was disqualified from the previous four events for such frivolous formalities as “too old” and “not enrolled in schools.” (For the record, I would note that I would have dominated.) The teams were organized by neighborhood and the sports were generally geared toward different age groups, so that anyone from the very young to the very old could participate. After the event concluded, 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 toast each other with hearty (and increasingly boisterous) toasts to the “Kanpai!”

While I would like to report that Shimukappu is a slice of average Japanese life, that is far from the case. My fellow revelers assured me (or perhaps more accurately, advised me not to assume) that such events are normal. Shimukappu, with its 1,300 residents, is the exception, not the rule, in Japan. Most communities are simply too large to accommodate a purely urban event. undokai. Our population density of 2.2 people/square kilometer is 1/27 of that of Hokkaido, the least populated prefecture in Japan, and 1/153 of the population density of Japan as a whole. Shimukappu has a constant problem recruiting enough workers for several reasons, namely the general migration of people from rural areas to cities and Japan’s shrinking population.

As in the Roaring Fork Valley, immigrants are an important part of the community. In fact, over 10% of residents have foreign residency permits (including me), the highest rate in Japan.

So perhaps this is the message of my writing: even though the differences between our communities are great, nothing unites us more than our shared love of sport for sport’s sake, regardless of where we come from.