History
When the prefecture plan for Saga was published in 1984, it was decided that Kashima City was never going to have a highway or a Shinkansen train connection. Mr. Masahiko Kuwahara, the mayor of Kashima, was also the president of the junior chamber. He created a committee called "Forum Kashima" to improve the city's cultural calendar. As a result, the 1st Kashima Gatalympic event was held on May 3, 1985.
As the Gatalympics became famous, the mudflats that had been neglected before were improved in condition and status. Under a new perspective, the mudflats became an important and valued symbol for the growth of the city as a whole. It was therefore natural that the mudflats became the central reason for which Kashima is now recognized for.
The proposed name for this event translates as "The big athletic meet on the mudflats." Though accurate, it was also a little dry. A second title was proposed: "The Gata-olympic big athletic meet on the mudflats". Finally, whilst heavily under the influence of alcohol, somebody could only utter as much as "Gatalympic" and from then on, that name has stuck like mud.
Read more about this topic: Kashima Gatalympics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)