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The story
At the All-Japan Junior High School Athletics Championships held in Yamaguchi Prefecture, an accompanying teacher from Kofu Municipal Kamijo Junior High School submitted the entry form 8 minutes past the deadline after it overlapped with picking up the athletes’ boxed lunches, barring four students from competing in the girls’ 4×100m relay.
On 5ch, opinions split between sympathizers saying “cut them some slack over 8 minutes” and defenders of the organizers arguing “it could’ve been avoided by submitting early” and “granting exceptions would make the deadline meaningless.”
“It overlapped with the boxed lunch pickup time” — All-Japan Junior High School Athletics Championships: 4 students barred from competing due to a procedural error, entry form submitted 8 minutes after deadline but not accepted — Yamanashi
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
At the meet held in Yamaguchi Prefecture on the 21st of this month, four students from Kofu Municipal Kamijo Junior High School were scheduled to run in the girls' 4×100m relay.
However, the accompanying coach forgot to submit the entry form before the race, and although it was handed in to meet headquarters 8 minutes after the deadline, it was not accepted, resulting in the team's withdrawal.
The school says it will hold a briefing for parents tomorrow, the 26th.
The Kofu City Board of Education stated, "We feel deeply sorry about this. We will work to prevent a recurrence and to care for the students' feelings."
The coach needs emotional care too
He's an adult, sure, but getting bashed and called an idiot,
turned into a meme on 5ch and X,
and feeling awful toward the kids on top of it — that could break someone
"That school got away with it, so we'll be fine too" — that's exactly the mindset this creates lol
Teams register their lineup right up to the wire to check everyone's condition
Missing the cutoff just isn't okay
Is that so?
If you knew other schools' entries ahead of time, you could adjust your own team's lineup
Once you know their 4 runners, you can change who you're matching up against
That's a memory that'll last a lifetime
It's that defiant, unapologetic attitude that rubs people the wrong way
Then you should let that slide too
But then the deadline loses all meaning
If it had been more like 2 minutes, maybe there'd have been a chance
If a properly-registered school lost out on a medal because of that, it'd be way too unfair
Blowing it over 8 minutes is rough
He flat-out forgot and used the lunch as an excuse
And yeah, I was the one it happened to
If I were the coach, I'd take my severance and quit on the spot
Reemploy at the lunch shop, maybe
So that famous line "Damn it, this rice ball had to be salmon!" (a melodramatic quote from the manga Slam Dunk) becomes real life?
When you've got several candidate runners and are narrowing it down to the final 4, waiting until the last minute makes sense
Someone could tweak their leg in another event that same day
Sounds like the organizers are just being bureaucratic for its own sake
That's because lineup changes are just normal in this world
Guess your brain's the small one here
Why would you deliberately create extra hassle — reopening slots, processing withdrawals — for same-day scratches?
Have you ever even played a sport?
If it was a fancy makunouchi bento, I'd be mad
If it was a cheap nori-ben (seaweed-and-rice box), I'll let it slide
Apparently it was a Jojoen bento (a boxed lunch from the famous, pricey yakiniku chain) ordered for good luck
It's been like this from the Showa era clear through to Reiwa — a homeroom teacher forgets to submit an application and it just ends with "ah my bad, I'll be more careful next time"
Background and Key Points
The All-Japan Junior High School Athletics Championships (全国中学校陸上競技大会) is the top domestic meet for middle-schoolers, one qualifying rung below anything international, so a berth here is often the single biggest moment of a 13- or 14-year-old’s competitive life. Japanese school meets typically keep entry forms open until race-day because coaches are expected to finalize a relay lineup based on same-day conditions — a pulled muscle in an earlier event, a subpar warm-up — rather than locking rosters days in advance. That is why the deadline exists at all: it is not paperwork for its own sake but the mechanism that keeps every team’s final four fair to the others. The formal parent briefing and the Board of Education’s scripted apology (“we feel deeply sorry, we will work to prevent a recurrence”) are standard Japanese institutional ritual after this kind of failure — expect contrition, not reinstatement; the students almost certainly do not get to run.
The thread’s real fault line isn’t whether the coach messed up — nearly everyone agrees he did — it’s whether an eight-minute miss should be forgivable at all, given how small the number looks against a year of training. The “no exceptions” side wins the argument in-thread because same-day entry only works if it’s enforced uniformly.
What’s easy to miss: the coach wasn’t slacking off, he was fetching a Jojoen boxed lunch — a genuinely expensive gesture meant to send the kids off well-fed for a national final. The good intention is exactly what turned into the story’s cruelest irony.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Live News board) thread “[Sad News] Track team coach: “I was picking up the lunches and the entry ended up late” → Team barred from competing.”
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