うたぴょんスポーツThis post isn't really about Uta's running. It's about her older brother, and about something we've been dealing with as a family since before this channel existed.
He was bullied at his old school and we moved him to a new one. We'd already made a video about going to the police after that didn't fully fix things. This is the follow-up — what happened after that meeting with the police.
What happened that day
Last time, we talked about taking the bullying to the police after Uta's brother had already switched schools and the harassment kept going anyway, just quieter and harder to point at directly. This video picks up from there. It walks through the sequence of events after we sat down with the police and got their guidance on how to handle what was still happening.
We'd linked the earlier video in the description so people could follow the whole story in order, since this one doesn't make much sense on its own.
What she said or how she looked
Uta herself doesn't say much in this one. This is her brother's story more than hers, and we kept it that way on purpose. What struck me, watching it back, is how normal everyone's faces look in between the hard conversations. Kids go back to doing kid things fast, even when adults are still working through something underneath.
Uta kept training through all of this. She's nine, born early in 2016, and she ended up ranked tenth nationally among third-grade girls over 1000m for the 2024 season. That kept going on a completely separate track from everything with her brother, which is its own kind of strange.
What the parent thought about it
Honestly, it's exhausting. You do the right thing — you move schools, you go to the police, you follow the guidance you're given — and the problem doesn't close up neatly on a schedule. It drags. You start to wonder if you're overreacting, then something happens and you know you're not.
What helped was that the police actually followed through, and we could point to that and say: this is being taken seriously now. That matters more than people realize until they need it.
Anything left over that matters
Separately, Uta showed up on N-Sta, a Japanese morning TV news programme, around the 10:29 mark, alongside another young runner the channel calls Run-gal-chan. We also mentioned the Utapyon t-shirts we sell, and the usual links to her Strava training log and the family blog if anyone wants to follow the running side of things more closely than the heavier stuff in this particular post.
If you're dealing with something like this with your own kid, I won't pretend there's a clean ending to offer you. We just kept showing up — for the school, for the police, for him. That's really all this post is: a record that we did, and that it's still ongoing.