This Is Japan
Explore everyday life in Japan
The second Monday in October is a national holiday in Japan known as “Fitness Day”. During this three-day weekend, many cities across the country hold marathons, and many people, sometimes as couples, sometimes as groups of coworkers or as families, plan active outings and two-day getaways. My family and I celebrated the day by going to a local pool.
The building that you see in this picture is a garbage incinerating facility. The heat and the power that are generated from this incinerator are used to heat a number of exercise and bathing pools at the swimming center we went to, which stands about four-hundred meters away from this incinerating facility.
This swimming center is a popular exercise facility for people of all ages. It offers an onsen-like bathing facility, a children’s pool with a small slide and fountain, a variety of shallow, warm water pools that have lines of jet-fed ergonomically shaped seats running through the middle of them, and it also has an oval-shaped walking pool with a strong current that is often full of people: seniors getting their exercise, parents holding or pushing their young children around in tubes, and slightly older children in goggles playing tag or just splashing around.
This year, Fitness Day happened to fall on October 10, which is also known as “Eye Care Day” in Japan because when you turn two tens (10/10) on their sides, they look like a pair of eyes and eyebrows.
“Eye Care Day” is a day which is used to remind people about ways to keep their eyes from being overstrained. The current advice being mostly about monitoring the time we spend looking at screens. To all of you Steemians out there, let that be a reminder to you to take up your Steem Fitness Challenges, turn off your computers, your TVs, and your cell phones, and give your eyes a rest.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting daily updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.
That would be wonderful if we could have national holidays = days off to strictly exercise in the US. Maybe there is one, if so I don't know about it. Also when in Japan, we did morning exercise with the family everyday. It was just on TV, my mother in law turned it on and the entire family, kids and adults all stretched and lightly exercised for about 15 mins every morning. I would love to see more of that in the US. Nice post. That pool looked pretty neat.
@runrudy: You're talking about radio taisou (exercises). They are another unique thing about Japan. I'll have to do a post about that at some other time, but here is a video for everyone else to check out in the meantime :
This is what you are talking about, radio taisou (exercises). That's great that you and your family actually did them. I generally just hear them in the background while I'm making breakfast.