8/16/2007

We had a little bump at 4:30am this morning— a 5.3 M earthquake off the coast of Chiba just east of Tokyo—so I have an early start today. Just as I was drifting off to sleep at 7am, the PA systems in the nearby park began cranking out at 110db, the Japanese “Radio Taiso/Exercise” song for the school kids on summer vacation.

Listen to the exercise song heard everyday throughout Japan via my MP3 podcast site, taro.podomatic.com:

Poor kids don’t even get to goof off for their already pathetically-short, 6-week vacation. Most students are forced to take part in these Stalinesque exercises for indoctrination in Japanese group-think (and more importantly to get them out of their mothers’ hair).

How do you like these “food stamp cards” shown below? As you can guess, this mysterious “STAMP CARD” needs to stamped as proof students have attended their morning exercises.

The Kampo home page has little animations like these and a full explanation (in Japanese) on how to do these Radio Taiso (ラジオ体操) exercises properly.

See the Wikipedia links to Rajio Taiso, and you should watch the music video by YMO showing of the true nature of Radio Taiso as well as the following videos too.

Podcast/audio lesson for aliens called:
Japanese lesson in English
Let’s create greater harmony with those who are different from us!

kodomo no koro no natsuyasumi to ieba,
子供の頃の夏休みといえば、
Speaking of summer vacation as a kid,

「rajio taisou」
「ラジオ体操」。
“radio gymnastic exercises”.

souchou kara okite,
早朝から起きて、
Getting up early in the morning,

sutanpu oshite morau ka-do wo kubi kara sagete,
スタンプ押してもらうカードを首から下げて、
with a stamp card dangling from my neck

majime ni ittotta wa~.
真面目に行っとったわ〜。
I would attend them earnestly.

koutei de rokuji han kara hajiman nen.
校庭で6時半から始まんねん。
It starts at six thirty in the schoolyard.

more….

Here is the official Japanese website with all the various Radio Taiso instructions.
Don’t worry about the Japanese—just click on all the links which will take to all the picture instructions on how to do the exercises: Kampo.japanpost.jp Radio Taiso.

Here’s a useful machine-translation from Japanese to English of the official Radio Taiso website