Baseball is King

While baseball is America's national past-time it certainly has taken a good hold here in the land of the rising sun.
My highschool (Kobe Kokusai Daigaku Fuzoku Koukou) is one of the strongest teams in Japan. In fact they are the regional Kinki champions. Congratulations! So there has been a very festive feeling at the school lately and it is very nice to see the local community supporting the team, as you can see here. The team is so strong this year that they have been invited to the annual Senbatsu tournament (All-Japan Highschool Baseball tournament) which is held at the Hanshin Tigers home stadium, Koshien stadium. This tournament is probably the equivalent of the NCAA Final 4 Tournament in the States. It is huge. Highschool baseball is just huge in Japan. So our team making it into the tournament is big local news. Here's where things go a tad askew though. As part of the pre-tournament celebrations a helicopter came to the school to drop off a banner to be hung in the school gymnasium. In preparation for this the school organized something called 人文字 hitomoji, which has the students line up in the shapes of letters to make words. OK, this is a little corny but too weird. The amazing thing, to me, is that the school decided to cut 13 hours of classtime for the entire school in order for the students to practice! I see 2 glaring problems here. A, how can spelling out a word on a field be more important than 13 hours of classtime right at the end of the school year? And B, why the hell does it take 13 hours of practice to do this? This isn't the friggin' Olympic Opening Ceremonies!
Here's some pics of the rehearsals:

Upside-down, but they are spelling out 'Kokusai'.

13 Hours of time well spent.