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The small town of Kashima on the Ariake Sea has created an event that has to be one of the best examples anywhere of people turning lemons into lemonade. The event, which has been held for about 20 years now, is called the Gatalympics. As with Bakademy, which we found out about the other day, it is a bilingual portmanteau word created by combining the Japanese word gata, or tidal mudflats, with Olympics.
And Olympics they are. The town invites hundreds of university students studying in Japan to participate in Olympic-style events held on the mud instead of a track or field. Before the competition starts, they march onto the assembly grounds at the seashore in groups divided by nationality, accompanied by recordings of their respective national anthems. The events include swimming, cycling races and mud dancing. They also lay out a course of plywood on the surface of the mudflats and the participants compete to see how far they can ride a bicycle before falling over into the slop.
The whole idea is to get filthy and laugh yourself silly. There’s nothing like competing in a pseudo athletic event and getting slathered from head to toe in stinking mud to create an international camaraderie. The people of Kashima benefit because the national media cover the event every year, and they get a piece of tourism revenue that ordinarily would go somewhere else.
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