Japanese with anime voice: episode53
Hello, I’m Sachi.
May 15 is the day that Japan’s first professional soccer league opened its doors. Therefore, the Japan Professional Football League has designated May 15 as J-League Day as a commemorative day. As you may have guessed, the “J” in J-League stands for “Japan. The year the league opened was 1993. At the time, I didn’t really know what it was, and I wasn’t interested in it. For some reason, I had a clear file of J-League teams at home, and when I brought it to school, boys in my class asked for it. Come to think of it, that did happen. Now that I think about it, it’s just a clear file. Why did they get so excited about something like that? Children are funny, aren’t they?
In junior high school, the J2 League was popular. Most junior high schools have soccer clubs, but my local junior high school did not have a soccer club. Probably because the baseball team used the playground and there was no place for the soccer team to practice. When I was a student, each class had its own soccer team, and league matches were held during lunchtime. Since it was a league game, naturally all grades had to play. When we cheered for them, for some reason, something unreasonable happened. When I was a freshman, if the team from my freshman class scored a goal or won a game against our senior class, we shouldn’t be too happy about it. When boys play soccer, they look reasonably cool, don’t they? So the girls will want to be excited to see them, right? If the opposing team was a senior class, they were not allowed to get too excited or cheer too loudly. The reason was that we had to pay attention to the seniors. That does not mean that the female seniors would think about their juniors and cheer calmly. They cheered just as loudly, and they cheered from the windows on the upper floors, so we felt pressured. And when we, the juniors, got too excited while cheering, we were warned from above that we were being too loud. I could not understand the behavior of the seniors who did this.
Why does this happen in junior high school? In elementary school, the older students who were supposed to be good friends become stricter with their juniors, as if they have changed. In high school, the hierarchical relationship becomes less strict. But for some reason, only during the three years of junior high school, a strict hierarchical relationship is established. I don’t know how it is nowadays. My parents went to the same junior high school as mine, and I am sure that at least in their generation, there was no such unreasonable strictness. However, in the time of my partner, who was eight years older than me, the seniors already had unreasonable rules to make the juniors obey them.
I have never experienced this, but in sports clubs, for some reason, the juniors would take all the senior members’ uniforms home and wash them. I never understood why on earth they had to do that. If washing the seniors’ uniforms would improve their sports skills, they would gladly wash them. But in reality, there is no such thing. It was a rule that I really did not understand. They used to call it tradition, but that is the wrong use of the word tradition.
The unreasonable rule I experienced was how to wear uniforms and gym uniforms. In my junior high school, there were short-sleeved and long-sleeved summer uniforms. However, the younger students were not allowed to wear the short-sleeved sailor uniforms to school until the older students started wearing them. In winter, there was a school-designated coat. This was the same as the rule for the summer uniform. For gym uniforms, the younger students were not allowed to wear their upper Tshirt out of their pants. The upper Tshirt had to be put into the trousers. When I think about it now, I laugh.
As I always say in my podcasts, I was a fool. In elementary and junior high school, I basically didn’t think anything of it, so I was oblivious to the severity of the older students. I probably didn’t care about anything, not even what was going on around me back then. I would like to think that I am a little more mature now than I was then. At the time, I was walking around without my top T-shirt in my pants. Then I heard something being said from the window on the upper floor. A Classmate told me that they were paying attention to me. I looked up to see three or four female seniors sticking their heads out of the window and yelling at me. I realized that they were shouting at me, but the content was so trivial that I didn’t know how to respond to it. That said, the girls never called me to the back of the school after that. Why didn’t they confront me directly after all that complaining? I, however, wore short sleeves and a coat to school whenever I wanted to. Don’t you think what I have told you so far is trivial, too? In junior high school, you work hard at this kind of thing. It can’t be helped, though, because teenagers are at an age when they think that the student world is their entire life. When you grow up, though, you realize how small the world was and how much nonsense you were following. I don’t know what kind of school life junior high school students are having now, but hopefully they are a generation without the unreasonable rules that existed in my time.
