Dave and Amity go to Japan - Yosakoi Matsuri (Festival)

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Welcome to Dave and Amity go to Japan

Yosakoi Matsuri (Festival)

Thursday, October 12 2006 @ 01:50 AM CDT
Contributed by: Amity
Views: 136

So, it's been commented on how I missed my paired-posting with Dave. Sorry! I had homework (my classes started earlier, and somehow even when Dave has homework, it goes away rather quickly...gr). Anyway, last weekend we went to a yosakoi festival and took some nifty pics.

What's Yosakoi, you may ask. Well, it's a type of dance in Japan. Started after WWII (1954, according to Wikipedia) and was a spin-off of a more traditional dance. If I remember correctly, the original dance depicted the daily life of a fishing community (people mimicked waves, gather fish, throwing nets, the sun rising...KSU performs this one and it's my favorite). Since its conception, Yosakoi has greatly grown in popularity. There are rules, though. For one, the music used has to contain some traditional elements (we heard variations that used the traditional shamisen/Japanese guitar and others that used modern day electric guitar). The dance must use these little wooden clappers. The clappers originally were used to make noise to scare birds out of the rice fields. The result of the clappers, though, is that when timed right they really add to the music itself. Yosakoi is also done by a group of dancers. Some of the groups we saw were quite small, and others I would say had 50-80 or 100 people. And they stayed together during the dance. Some groups had girls as young as 5 or so, and another had a woman that was in her 80's.

Also, an advertisement for KSU -- we have one of the few Yosakoi clubs in the US. In my opinion, they are very good and definitely were equal to or higher in skill compared to much of what we saw. http://www.k-state.edu/yosakoi/Welcome.html. They perform often and are definitely worth seeing.

The festival lasted Saturday and Sunday. Saturday, however, did not start out good. Actually, I was in a horrible mood. It had rained for a day or two beforehand, and my long-awaited Saturday started off in a cold, miserable misty rain. The cold, clammy kind that your umbrella cannot keep out and is just miserable to be out in. Since many of the performances (there were many locations) were in open-air places, I figured...no performances. Me sad. :(

Miraculously, since the rain was supposed to continue through Sunday night, it stopped about noon-ish. Dave and I rushed to a bus that went downtown and then wandered around, clasping our kanji-filled flyer. Eventually we 'deciphered' the map (ahem, happened to walk in the right direction) and came across the main location of the event. There were many many booths set up, as in the case of all festivals...but the shows weren't going to start until 4ish. Dave and I, being hungry, decided to sample the local fare (most of the booths were food booths). After several unsuccessful attempts by Dave to find yummy food (he struck out twice with grilled chicken and soba noodles), I decided on the safe route and went over to some good-smelling steak-on-a-stick. The nice man cooked it to my liking, and I stuffed myself.

It got the Amity-is-happy sign of approval.

Dave tried cow-tongue (on-a-stick) from the same place and it too was tasty, but not my American-ish steak. It was kinda chewy.

Time passes, and it is cold. We wander around, and find some guy feeding pigeons.

That being very boring, we decide to eat again. I find a Japanese-style sweet that I enjoy, daifuku. The outside is chewy and made of rice flour, and the inside can vary. The kind I like has strawberry filling. Usually, though, they are filled with sweet-bean paste. It's...a sorta substitution for chocolate. If you have never tasted chocolate, it's pretty sweet and good. If you have...sorry. But, as memories of Dove dark fade, daifuku becomes more and more appealing.

I personally think that is a nice shot of East meets West.

While chowing down, we also generated a lot of trash. Now, for those who don't know, Japan takes the recycling thing to a whole new level. How insane it gets depends on the city. We have three types of trash -- household, plastic, and plastic bottles/glass/cans (actually, those are separated too, but we just place them in the right bins on the right day). Ai's mother told me that she has to separate her trash into 14 categories, and must wash everything before throwing it away. The bags you use are clear as well, so if you do something wrong you get a "You Bad!" sticker by the trash gestapo who will refuse to pick up your trash until you correct it. Anyway, back to the festival. There were no huge bins of throw-everything-hereness. Instead, there was a very polite swat team of trash nazis.

As you can see, they are ready and willing to guide you to the proper receptacle for the waste you have produced. There is also a bucket for uneaten/undrunk food, a jar for grilled-meat sticks, etc.

Yosakoi finally started, and we really enjoyed ourselves...until the circulation ceased in the lower half of our bodies. The stage was in front of a large cobble-stone area which had plastic (since it had rained) laid down for people to sit on. Oh, and you remove your shoes before getting on the plastic so you don't track in dirt/mud -- very Japanese here. Well, we westerners are not used to sitting on our legs on bumpy stone. Worse, as a girl, I am not allowed really to sit cross-legged. So, every five minutes or so you switch legs to the other can regain sensation. Here are some pics of what we saw, and we apologize for the quality of pictures. We ripped them from our video, and so it was hard to make everything un-blurry yet not so fuzzed out that you could tell what was going on:

The girl was really good. She was so tiny though!

After an hour of videotaping, we were so cold and so numb that we decided it was time to return. We grabbed some hot cakes filled with cream. Mmmm, warm and tasty.

We also took some pictures of the main shopping district. This is actually a VERY long road with sometimes-covered shopping (the cover can retract during good weather, as in the photo below). The shops here are very very trendy, and usually very expensive. If you wander from this road, the ones intersecting and running parallel to it have many smaller shops and millions of small restaurants. Dave and I plan on venturing there soon, as we have learned the phrase for "give me whatever you recommend" and thus thwarting our inability to read menus.

Sunday we returned for a bit after some adventurous shopping. The shopping was for a kotatsu (heated table...comes next Thursday!) that I managed to negotiate successfully. Shipping and everything, along with shipping some of our other items. We returned to the matsuri (festival) after our success and kicked ourselves for not bringing the camera. Because it was even better. We got baked potatoes (it's kinda hard to eat a baked potato with chopsticks, actually) and mourned because they ran out of steak. Grilled chicken, I resolved (it was okay...really good, actually, but steak...). On our way home, it turned out that the REALLY huge groups were performing in the shopping area. They made this...parade...and would perform, then run to the next spot, perform again...these people had stamina. Each group must have performed 10-15 times. And they were really good. I can't believe how in sync that many people could be.

End festival.

In other news, school is starting to pick up. I can already tell I'm going to have a lot of homework. I finally maybe made a friend. She's one of the few girls I have in any of my classes, and the only one who speaks English (she's from Washington, the state). She's only been here since Friday, so she's going through the 'why did I ever think I could do this' phase that I went through a while back (and still, occasionally, feel). I just met her today, so hopefully a friendship will take off.

I'm pretty lonely, because it's just Dave and I. Both of us would really like someone to go places with, especially restaurants, because the really fun places usually cater to multiple people. And, it'd be nice to have a girlfriend. Especially one that can cook and teach me how to make Japanese food (btw -- my friend Midori in Chiba was kind enough to go to the store and take pictures of items and explain how to make them, so next week may contain a more varied diet). The loneliness is the worst not when I'm with Japanese people, though, because I know the silence to them is being polite, but with the internationals. Since Dave and I are two of the few who live in an apartment, the dorm-students are pretty tightly knit and exclude us. Dave's had much more luck in the engineering department than I have (international friendliness-wise). I am just shocked that Americans are not really willing to talk to other Americans. I wasn't ready for that.

As far as culture shock goes, for the moment I am on the upswing. Life is starting to get easier (I FINALLY made it up a hill without getting off and walking my bike). Even comfortable. My language has noticeably improved, probably because I'm less hypercritical about it. More willing to accept mistakes, I guess, which takes off a lot of pressure and I actually do better. I successfully talked through a problem I was having with my bank, and the staff that was helping me was so thrilled with my Japanese that she started praising me to the other staff members. It was a bit embarrassing, actually. But, then the next day I didn't understand half of the foreign student orientation...so it comes and goes.

All in all, I'm content (aside from the friend category, but I'm sure that will improve in time). I really missed school and love homework. Strange, eh.

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Yosakoi Matsuri (Festival)

Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 13 2006 @ 09:49 AM CDT

The linguist instructs you that the past participle of 'drink' is 'drunk,' so the negative adjective form should be 'undrunk' :)

Yosakoi Matsuri (Festival) - Authored by: Amity on Friday, October 13 2006 @ 01:08 PM CDT