Every now and then, when you live in Japan, you get invited to something and aren’t told how serious it is. You usually end up learning something about yourself. One of the things I learned in Japan is that I suck at organized tug of war.

Keep in mind, until I got to Japan I didn’t know there was such a thing as organized tug of war.

Sometime during my first couple years in Japan, I was invited to participate as part of a mostly foreign team in a tug of war competition. My team had a couple disadvantages 1) me 2) our tallest and strongest friend would not be available for the competition and 3) our women were scrappy but petite.

In our ignorance though, we still thought we might make a good showing of it. That ended as soon as we arrived at the gym.

We were in mismatched sweatshirts, jeans and sneakers–although we may have been asked to wear similar colors. The other teams were decked out in professional tug of war uniforms. These included rugby style shirts with reinforced underarms and shoulders, matching shorts and special indoor tug of war shoes. They also, it turned out, had technique and practice. Even their women would look at us and go “I must break you”. There’d then be a short chat as someone corrected them. Then they’d look at us and go “I will break you”.

In our first match, I think I was the anchor and my friend Tom was in front of me. As soon as the judges said go the opposing team started bouncing and chanting. Each bounce pulled us closer and closer to oblivion and we lost.

It turned out we had too much weight at the back. We started experimenting with me at the front and Tom at the back and vice versa. This proved pretty effective as it gave us a tall person as leverage at the front and that made each bounce slightly less effective. We also learned to pull as a team.

There were, however, no scrappy team of misfits overcoming impossible odds moments.

We lost every match, but at least they weren’t Denver Bronco Super Bowl / Brazil versus Germany World Cup 2014 bad.

After that we may have gone to a party with the people who invited us but I don’t remember.