Another season of festivals. Just like last year, the first up was Nakano festival. Alexis enjoyed seeing her old students. We met alot of new people too. Even though Nakano isn't our home town, we were invited to a Nakano after-party where we got to know some people, ate some food, and practiced our Japanese.
This year we ended up going with our neighbor to a Catepillar festival (you know, the company. Sorry dad). They had entertainment for the kids, so we got to witness a live Power Rangers performance. It's hard to describe experiencing the most pure cheese, the cheesiest of cheesy, unabashed and unapologetic.
Next up we headed down to a festival near the train station where Alexis' new school is. Her students were so surprised to see her and amazed that she was in a yukata. As with seemingly all Japanese festivals, we wrote our wishes on paper and tied them to flimsy trees. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
Next up was of course our very own Mikage festival. But this year was a little different. We were invited to be part of the ohayashi. We showed up to practice only to realize it was only elementary and junior high school kids. Oh well, we're foreign. Many of the kids were a bit weirded out for us to be there. Others (particularly younger ones) were much more welcoming. Over the many practices we had, most of them warmed up to us in some way or another. After learning the basic drum pattern, the junior high students stayed behind to learn the more difficult ones. We decided that the basic pattern was too easy, so we'd give it a shot.
Unfortunately they weren't coming from a classical music perspective which meant they were teaching us using Japanese drum onomatopoeia. Where an English speaker might typically say "Boom boom chicka tat chicka tat tat" a Japanese speaker might say "Don don tsuka dan tsuka dan dan". Luckily, they had it written down. Unluckily it was just written out onomatopoeia, in katakana, written vertically. Disaster. We took a video of some of the better players and when we got home I actually translated it to semi-proper notes on a page. It made it a hundred times easier for us.
Anyways, so yeah. The actual festival. Got there in the morning and got ready for a long day.
We watched the priest transfer the shrine god into the mikoshi then headed out ahead of them.
We were basically there to make a bunch of noise so people could come out and see their shrine's god. We all took turns playing drums and others danced, played the flute and some other percussion.
Every hour or so we would take a break at a designated stop where someone had prepared fresh snacks and drinks for us and the mikoshi carriers. Tasty. At some point we broke away from the ohayashi to help carry the mikoshi for a little bit.
On our way back to the shrine we parked the ohayashi and the mikoshi was paraded around our town's main intersection.
Then finally we were back at the shrine where we finished our festivities with food stands, dances, a drum line with enormous drums and other things.
It was a really long day but quite the experience.
The last festival of the summer was our neighborhood festival. Small and simple. We also drummed at this festival, this time to music as people danced around the drummer.
FESTIVAL COMPILATION:
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