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The story
Because the Osaka Junior High School Athletic Association (Osaka Chutairen), made up of junior high school teachers, failed to complete the entry procedures, eight junior high and high school students who had been selected to represent Osaka at the Junior Olympic U16 Championships in Mie Prefecture have been barred from competing. Osaka Governor Hirofumi Yoshimura submitted a formal request to the Japan Association of Athletics Federations (JAAF) asking that the students be allowed to compete, but the federation responded that it would not make any exceptions. Even though the mistake was made by the adults handling the paperwork, it’s the athletes themselves who bear the consequences — a situation that split opinion on 5ch between sympathy for the students and the more principled stance that ‘if you make an exception once, there’s no end to it.’
JOC Track Meet Entry Omission Issue: Governor Yoshimura’s Request Rejected, JAAF Says ‘No Relief Measures’
Eight junior high and high school students from Osaka Prefecture have been unable to compete in a national tournament at the end of this month because Osaka’s athletics federation was late submitting their entries. The Japan Association of Athletics Federations (JAAF), which organizes the tournament, announced that it “will not take any relief measures.”
The eight students, all residents of Osaka Prefecture, were selected as Osaka representatives at a competition held in Osaka City last month and were set to compete in the Junior Olympic U16 Championships in Mie Prefecture this month. However, it was discovered that the Osaka Junior High School Athletic Association (Osaka Chutairen), made up of junior high school teachers from within the prefecture, had not completed the entry procedures.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
The ones at fault are the adults who forgot to submit it.
The problem is there's no system to hold them accountable.
Neither the federation nor the kids did anything wrong, yet the kids get punished and the federation gets painted as the villain too.
Meanwhile the one idiot who actually screwed up faces zero consequences.
Do you have nothing better to do?
Just leave it be and mind your own business.
Like a late-entry fee in horse racing?
About 3 million yen (~$20,000) per kid?
Exactly. They just need to build a system that accounts for human error in the first place.
But it's definitely rough on the students.
Why not just slap the athletic federation with a penalty or sanction?
Clueless adults have been pulling this kind of thing forever.
Like forgetting to book tickets or lodging for a school trip until the day it's happening.
If it only hurt the adults who messed up, fine, but the kids end up suffering too.
And the fact that the federation has never bothered to come up with any kind of relief measure for this until now is also pretty questionable.
Just let them compete.
Are you serious?
This exactly.
Just change a dumb rule like that already. Don't keep it out of some misplaced guilt toward past athletes — make the rules with future athletes in mind.
Seriously, what is this federation even for? Nothing but idiots.
Then both the federation and the students are victims here.
By the way, why did Yoshimura even get involved?
He must have known there was no way to push this through.
What is this, Trump and the World Cup?
Yoshimura shouldn't be butting in just to score political points.
What is he, Trump? lol
It's a human rights issue and an education issue for junior high and high schoolers, so of course it's a political matter.
From here, it'll just have to be settled through damages.
The teacher responsible should get a stern warning and a good smack on the backside.
Or is it just 'rules are rules'?
The kids take the punishment.
Whoever designed this system is a genius, truly.
Once you're out in the working world, you really learn how unfair life is.
Good thing they're getting that naive fantasy of 'doing the right thing always wins' smashed this early.
Background and Key Points of This Story
The tournament in question is a national track and field competition called the “Junior Olympic U16,” which only athletes who have cleared prefectural qualifiers can enter. The reason these students were barred this time is that Osaka Chutairen (Osaka Junior High School Athletic Association, a group of teachers) — the body responsible for managing the entry deadline — failed to complete the submission; neither the athletes themselves nor the JAAF were at fault. Opinion on the thread split between sympathy for the students and the more principled argument that “granting an exception once sets a precedent that becomes impossible to contain” — though notably, neither camp directly blamed the JAAF by name. On the other hand, Governor Yoshimura’s (Governor of Osaka Prefecture and leader of the Japan Innovation Party) submission of a formal request sparked a wave of posts that drifted from what should have been the core issue — the lack of any system to hold the adults who made the mistake accountable — into unrelated political arguments about the Japan Innovation Party, inflation, and diplomacy; those tangents have been left out of this article. Neither the original article nor the thread specifies what preventive measures might follow or the exact circumstances behind the delayed submission.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geisoku Sokuho+) thread ‘[Track and Field] 8 Osaka junior high/high schoolers miss national tournament entry due to Chutairen error — Governor Yoshimura submits request, but JAAF says ‘no relief measures’.’
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