I've written before about the Japanese inventing sports and making them "softer" or more easier to play, but there's one sport they've changed and pushed it above and beyond, inventing rules, equipment, and expanding this one-time childhood activity into international winter 'sport'. I have to admit that it's pretty brilliant, and having participated in a tournament last weekend, I'm all for taking it to the Olympics.

I'm talking... snowball fights!

Snowball Fights - or Yukigassen as it's called in Japanese (Yuki=snow, kassen=battle) - has been around in Japan as an organized sport since the 1980's. It started right here in Hokkaido from it's humble beginnings as small town's yearly tourist attraction to a winter activity with an international committee and tournaments held all throughout Japan and countries like Finland, Norway, and Australia. The Yukigassen court is 40m x 10m with small, 1m-tall ice shelters placed strategically throughout the field and a Center-line that separates the two teams' areas.

The two ways to win are by hitting all of the opponent team members (a hit by a snowball anywhere on your body is an out, even if you drop it on yourself or from friendly-fire!) or by pulling the opponents team flag out of its base. Each team only has 90 snowballs for the entire 3-minute round and consists of 7 players, 1 coach, and 2 substitutes. The 7 players are divided into 4 forward players (wearing black-numbered vests) and 3 back players (wearing red-numbered vests). Forward players are not allowed to cross behind Back Line (where the snowballs are) so it's up to the back players to roll or pass the snowballs up to the forward players, who are probably bunkered down behind the shelters. Only 3 team members are allowed in the opponents area (i.e. are allowed to cross the Center line at one time) and having any more is an automatic forfeit. You can check out all the rules on the official Yukigassen website (in English): http://www.yukigassen.jp/english/index.html They've even developed equipment for official Yukigassen tournament play including protective hockey-like helmets, colored vests and a perfectly spherical and oh-so-grippable, 45-at-a-time snowball machine. I seriously want one, but the 73,500yen ($850) price tag per machine is a but of a bummer.

A lot of Yukigassen tournaments are held in Hokkaido around this time of year. Some are local, others are regional, with prize money for the winning team (30,000 yen at the tournament I played at) and a spot to compete at the all-national tournament in Yamanashi prefecture. Glen's town of Kiyosato (up near where I climbed Mt.Shari in the summer) had one of these tournaments and invited us to enter a team of gaijin. So we gathered a group of 8 ALT's and called ourselves the Storm Troopers. All except two of us had never played before but, fortunately, we would be able to watch a few matches before our first one. The matches were pretty.. tame.. to put it politely. They preferred defensive strategies which included a lot of snowball lobbing at the people behind the shelters then staying alive until the clock ran out. We'd worked out a strategy the night before which involved rushing at the opponents flag before they had time to get any snowballs, but we realized the impracticalities of it after seeing our first game (goes to show you shouldn't strategize before ever playing the sport). We decided to scrap our strategy and go free-for-all, balls-to-the-walls, and do our best.


It turned out being the best strategy because we had a blast! We played valiantly and (kind of) aggressively, which I think took the Japanese teams off guard. We had two sets of two matches that day - the first of which we tied then lost, the second of which we lost and lost. Two of those losses were desperate (but successful) dashes by our opponents for our team flag after after we'd shrunk their numbers quite a bit, and the other loss was from an epic one-on-one stand-off with Simon and the remaining member from the other team... ending up with a snowball to Simon's gut. Zannen.

Overall it was a ton of fun, even though we lost horribly (but not by much!). It was the same thrill of exhilaration and satisfaction you got as a kid when you threw a snowball 10 meters and smoked your opponent in the head. Ohh yeah.. Why no one thought of making this a sport before? I have no idea, but I'm bringing Yukigassen to Canada!