Marathon and Kandou Revisited...

It's marathon season again in Japan. My first encounter with the Japanese obsession with marathon was when I joined the company in Bengaluru that brought me to Japan as a trainee in the last century. One fine afternoon, the person known as the principal - a director of the company - said we would be shown a video as part of our training. Excellent! We thought, but it turned out to be a 3-hour recording of a marathon race in Japan, which is like a 3-day eye surgery, without anaesthesia, using nail clippers. How thrilled can you get watching a person running behind motorcycles and cars for couple of hours? The commentators (yes, it was accompanied by a "running" commentary - so apt) seemed to be so excited about all this, I felt they were watching something else that was not on screen. Perhaps there are nude girls running in front of the runners!! Given the fact that we were just beginning to learn Japanese and had only a rudimentary knowledge of the language, the whole video lesson was akin to waterboarding.

After coming here, I realized that marathons were in fact a big thing in Japan. There were regular live relays of major marathon races. And also, that marathon was a general term for any long distance race. So, we have anything from a 10 km marathon to a 100 km marathon. The 100 km marathon is organized by a major TV station, which chooses a mid-level celebrity to run the race over a 24-hour period of torture when they relay it live. Which brings me to the other national pastime of Japan. "Kandou" (definition from a previous posting -"Kandou" can be roughly translated as constipated emotion. Didn't get it? Here's a better analogy. Many of you must be familiar with those baby Shalini movies with Mammooty as her Dad, where she has cancer and Mammooty has piles and people, especially women, in the movie theatre get all choked up and then cries and throws up like those North Koreans at the Great Leader's funeral.) During the 24-hour live relay of this person's 100 km run, we're fed a whole bunch of sentimental crap related to the ordeals that the person went through to prepare for the run. We also see the person frothing, limping and crawling his way through the streets of Tokyo to the live studio egged on by tearful spectators and celebrities. And after a whole day (and night) of mindless, meaningless mawkishness the person finishes the race, which is the cue for everybody at the studio (and probably across the nation) to let loose their emotions. Cameras pan the choked up faces of celebrities and the audience. All pent up emotions rolling down like a pile of elephant faeces on a mountain slope.

Why do they do this? Perhaps elephants like rolling their crap down mountain slopes. No, wrong answer. Perhaps the Japanese like to see someone winning against all odds. Perhaps it is to build character. My wife revealed that she had to run marathons during her school days. In fact it was a "72 km marathon" for boys and the regular 42.195 km for girls. And unless you're sick (i.e. you're at your deathbed) or have some other valid reason (like "you're dead") you'll have to complete the race, no matter how much time it takes.

P.S. George Carlin kicked the bucket last week. I have extensively used his quotes in the "Quote for the month" section over the past several years. This month's quote is also from him. It wouldn't be wrong to say that I have been heavily influenced by his ideas.