うたぴょんスポーツThis one isn't about running. It's about Uta's older brother, and a stretch of months that have been hard on our whole house.
He was bullied at his old school, so we moved him. That was supposed to be the fix. It wasn't, and this post is about what we did next.
What happened that day
My son was bullied at his previous school. We made the decision to transfer him, thinking a clean start somewhere new would put it behind him. For a while it looked like it might.
It didn't last. The harassment picked back up, not from the same people in the same building, but it kept finding him. By the time we posted this video on December 19, 2025, we'd reached the point where moving schools once wasn't going to be enough. So we went and talked to the police about it.
I'm not going to lay out every detail here. Some of it isn't mine to publish, and none of it needs names attached - not his, not anyone else's. What I can say is that this has been going on long enough, across more than one school, that we felt we needed someone outside the family and outside the school system involved.
How it's felt at home
There's no single dramatic scene to describe. It's more like a low hum that doesn't go away - checking in with him after school, watching for the days he goes quiet, the two of us as parents talking in low voices after the kids are in bed.
Uta is nine, in the middle of her own running season, and she's around all of this. I won't put words in her mouth about what she understands or how she feels about her brother's situation, because I don't want to speak for her. But she's not shielded from it. It's part of what our family has been carrying this winter.
What I thought about it as her dad
Changing schools felt like the obvious move at the time, and I don't regret trying it. But I've learned the hard way that a new building and a new class list don't automatically end something like this. Bullying doesn't always stay inside one school's walls.
Going to the police wasn't a decision we made lightly or quickly. It felt like admitting that we, as parents, couldn't solve this on our own - and in a way, that's exactly what it was. I'd rather make that admission and get help than keep hoping it resolves itself.
I also think a lot about Uta in all this. She's watching how her mother and I handle a problem we can't just run through. I hope what she takes from it, eventually, is that asking for outside help isn't failure.
Other things from this week
Life kept moving on the running side too. Uta appeared on Nスタ, a Japanese evening news program, alongside a young runner nicknamed 'Run Girl' - you can catch that clip around the 10:29 mark on the show's own upload. She's currently ranked 10th nationally for 2024 among third-grade girls over 1000m, which still feels wild to type out.
We've also got Utapyon T-shirts up for sale again, for anyone who's been following her races and wanted one. None of that cancels out the harder stuff in this post - it's just what else was true the same week.
If you're a parent dealing with something similar, you already know there's no clean ending to post here - just the next step, and then the one after that. We're taking ours.