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Road to World No. 1 in the WorldSkills Olympics (Part 1) "In-House Cooperative System that Determines Victory and Defeat

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games were postponed to 2021, and Japan was thrilled by the success of Japanese athletes, who won more medals than any other country in history. The Olympics ended with such great success that we had almost forgotten that the Tokyo Olympics had been postponed. However, since the Games were originally scheduled to be held in the summer of 2020, but the postponement of one year was announced a few months before, the feelings of the athletes and others involved must have been complicated when the decision was made to postpone the Games. Even a layman can imagine the difficulty and hardship of making adjustments and controlling motivation in order to peak for the Games and start all over again one year after the postponement.

*Awards ceremony at the National Convention

Now, the WorldSkills Competition. It was November 2020 when Hikaru Kaita ("Kaita"), a member of Marushin's Offset Printing Section, won the national competition of the WorldSkills Competition (Printing Division) and was selected to represent Japan. The World Championships, to be held in Shanghai, China, were originally scheduled for the fall of 2021, but in November 2020, when the domestic competition was held, it was decided to postpone it to 2022. In that sense, it may be said that there is no difficulty in adjustment and motivation for the Games compared to the Tokyo Olympics. The domestic competitions are a reset, and the World Championships two years later can be a fresh start somewhere else. The time to make that new start has just arrived.

Last November, I received advice once remotely from Mr. Yuchi, who represented Japan in the last competition, and in January and February of this year, I participated in training at a vocational training school in Tokyo. After that, meetings and training sessions were organized, and from the beginning of this coming GW, full-scale practical training will begin within the company. Aiming for a high ranking in the WorldSkills competition depends on how much training we can accumulate within the company. The content of the WorldSkills competition includes a lot of equipment and tasks that are not used in daily work, and of course training is conducted while performing normal work duties.

*Pre-training

In this series of articles, we will write about various events leading up to the WorldSkills Olympics, focusing on the training sessions, as well as interviews with Kaita and other people involved. When we asked Kaita about his current state of mind, he replied, "Motivation...I have to get my motivation up. It will be a little while before his engine revs up to full speed. (To be continued)

Interviewed and written by Tanaka, Public Relations