August 2- 8, 2010
Sunday was my final night of playing the drums at Techi Nebuta it was bittersweet, but mostly just made me really sad. I wish I could do something like this every year no matter where we live! Hopefully I'll find a Taiko group in the states that will let me join :) I'm bringing home my gear and have every intention of keeping the dream alive!
I wanted to start by saying how nice it is to have family around to share our time here in Japan with. Japan will always be very special to me and Eric and the memories we are making here will last a lifetime, no doubt. It's fun to share the stories and I'm sure it always will be, but it's also really nice to have family to share them with in person. In January we were able to make some Asian memories with my family in Thailand and I'll never forget that trip, and now we have Eric's parents here to share our town with. I'm ever grateful for it.
After our fun filled weekend away, we enjoyed some quiet time at home on Monday, especially knowing the plans that lay ahead for the week, we needed to rest up to prepare because festival season is upon us!
After our fun filled weekend away, we enjoyed some quiet time at home on Monday, especially knowing the plans that lay ahead for the week, we needed to rest up to prepare because festival season is upon us!
Tuesday morning Glenn played golf at the Naqua Shirikami range. In the background of this photo you can see the ski trails Eric enjoys in the winter :) The view from the course is just as pretty as the course itself, it overlooks the town and of course the Sea of Japan. This course isn't just beautiful, it also happens to be one of the many oddities here that assure me we are currently in the right place! This golf course was designed by Arnold Palmer, who also designed the course we were married on just three short weeks before moving to Japan!
After Eric came home from work on Tuesday we quickly piled in the car and hit the road to head to Akita Kanto Matusuri (Akita Lantern Festival). Akita is the prefecture directly south of us, it's name means 'Autumn Rice Field'. We have been there once before on a road-trip, where we got rained out trying to camp; this trip was much more successful. The drive to Akita City is about 4 hours. Eric gets home from work at a quarter til four and the festival started at 7, so we had a trek cut out for us! But we made it at 7:30 and didn't miss much, an opening ceremony I'm sure. This festival is a little different than most in the summer. Most of the festivals in summer involve large nebuta floats and a parade. This festival involves dancers and musicians like Nebuta but has very talented poles carrying many lanterns balanced by dancers. There are bleachers in the middle of their long track and people line the streets as well. While the 'parade' moves, its in a loop so it is always in front of you no matter where you sit. Here is a picture of one corner of the festival from a short distance away:
And here it is up close:
Akita kanto Matsuri was so impressive and very lively! The festival is for a good rice harvest, and the poles of lanterns are designed to resemble a stalk of rice. The way they float through the sky made me think of masts on a ship. The large size poles that most of the adults carry are 12 meters tall, weigh around 50 kg and have 46 lanterns hanging from 9 cross bars. The lanterns are made of paper, sadly the pretty words on them are generally advertisements. They are illuminated by candles. It's very impressive to watch them go out in unison from the way the poles are set firmly on the ground. Unfortunately in looking at these pictures I don't think they do the festival the justice it deserves. It's truly magnificent. 
The performers balance the pole in a variety of ways, single-handed, one one shoulder, on their hip or toosh or even on their forehead. Can you imagine walking in a crowded street with a pole nearly 40 feet tall that weighs 110 pounds balancing on your head??? It's pretty insane to think about, and especially intriguing to see!! There are also smaller poles for beginners and children but there are plenty of full size lantern poles dancing around. 
One very important feature of this festival was a thin, and sturdy rope, strung across the street lights that stopped the poles from falling into the crowd should someone loose their balance. The performers kept the poles up for an impressively long time, but on occasion I was quite thankful for that rope. After we enjoyed the festival for a few hours we headed to dinner. We took Eric's parents to Korean BBQ to devour some meat. The menu was entirely in Kanji, which I am still terrible at reading but I asked the waitress a few questions and explained what we did and did not want to eat, we even played a little bit of charades trying to explain where the meat comes from! I thought things went well but then one of our plates of meat looked very strange, Glenn was brave and tried it but the rest of us refrained based on his description of how chewy it was. I later asked what it was... wanna guess?? It was cow's esophagus! GROSS!! The one bite Glenn ate was all anyone consumed of that! I guess it's nice that they eat all parts of the animal so nothing goes to waste, but I'd rather be vegetarian than be subjected to eating that. Aside from our anatomical mishap, dinner was quite enjoyable. Right as we finished dinner the festival was officially ending so groups were making their way out, one of the groups stopped and did a mini encore right in front of our restaurant so we went out front with the staff and watched the 'show'. They had lots of little kids practicing and it was really fun to watch. After dinner we packed back into the car and started the long drive home. We made it home around 2am and of course went straight to bed. It was a long haul to do in an evening, but the 7+ hours in the car were totally worth it!! So far, Kanto Matsuri has been one of my favorite festivals in Japan.
After Eric came home from work on Tuesday we quickly piled in the car and hit the road to head to Akita Kanto Matusuri (Akita Lantern Festival). Akita is the prefecture directly south of us, it's name means 'Autumn Rice Field'. We have been there once before on a road-trip, where we got rained out trying to camp; this trip was much more successful. The drive to Akita City is about 4 hours. Eric gets home from work at a quarter til four and the festival started at 7, so we had a trek cut out for us! But we made it at 7:30 and didn't miss much, an opening ceremony I'm sure. This festival is a little different than most in the summer. Most of the festivals in summer involve large nebuta floats and a parade. This festival involves dancers and musicians like Nebuta but has very talented poles carrying many lanterns balanced by dancers. There are bleachers in the middle of their long track and people line the streets as well. While the 'parade' moves, its in a loop so it is always in front of you no matter where you sit. Here is a picture of one corner of the festival from a short distance away:
And here it is up close:
Akita kanto Matsuri was so impressive and very lively! The festival is for a good rice harvest, and the poles of lanterns are designed to resemble a stalk of rice. The way they float through the sky made me think of masts on a ship. The large size poles that most of the adults carry are 12 meters tall, weigh around 50 kg and have 46 lanterns hanging from 9 cross bars. The lanterns are made of paper, sadly the pretty words on them are generally advertisements. They are illuminated by candles. It's very impressive to watch them go out in unison from the way the poles are set firmly on the ground. Unfortunately in looking at these pictures I don't think they do the festival the justice it deserves. It's truly magnificent. 
The performers balance the pole in a variety of ways, single-handed, one one shoulder, on their hip or toosh or even on their forehead. Can you imagine walking in a crowded street with a pole nearly 40 feet tall that weighs 110 pounds balancing on your head??? It's pretty insane to think about, and especially intriguing to see!! There are also smaller poles for beginners and children but there are plenty of full size lantern poles dancing around. 
One very important feature of this festival was a thin, and sturdy rope, strung across the street lights that stopped the poles from falling into the crowd should someone loose their balance. The performers kept the poles up for an impressively long time, but on occasion I was quite thankful for that rope. After we enjoyed the festival for a few hours we headed to dinner. We took Eric's parents to Korean BBQ to devour some meat. The menu was entirely in Kanji, which I am still terrible at reading but I asked the waitress a few questions and explained what we did and did not want to eat, we even played a little bit of charades trying to explain where the meat comes from! I thought things went well but then one of our plates of meat looked very strange, Glenn was brave and tried it but the rest of us refrained based on his description of how chewy it was. I later asked what it was... wanna guess?? It was cow's esophagus! GROSS!! The one bite Glenn ate was all anyone consumed of that! I guess it's nice that they eat all parts of the animal so nothing goes to waste, but I'd rather be vegetarian than be subjected to eating that. Aside from our anatomical mishap, dinner was quite enjoyable. Right as we finished dinner the festival was officially ending so groups were making their way out, one of the groups stopped and did a mini encore right in front of our restaurant so we went out front with the staff and watched the 'show'. They had lots of little kids practicing and it was really fun to watch. After dinner we packed back into the car and started the long drive home. We made it home around 2am and of course went straight to bed. It was a long haul to do in an evening, but the 7+ hours in the car were totally worth it!! So far, Kanto Matsuri has been one of my favorite festivals in Japan. Like I said, It's Festival Season!!!!! Wednesday was my first night performing in Techi Nebuta, and of course, participating in a festival was an experience I cannot adequately express in words, and it was certainly something I'll never forget. I have far too many pictures to share and stories to tell to have it be a section in this giant blog so I'm going to save it as the opening post for my new blog, details coming soon. To tide you over, here is a picture of me, Dana, Travis and Kevin with the drums :) Stay tuned!
This is a replica of the guards tower that stood here.
Like I've said before... we're big kids!! This is us playing in the museum :) 
After our 2.5 hour drive home our fun filled day came to an end and, by this point, that was a very good thing! We had quite a day visiting ancient and modern sites, art, archeology, architecture and a festival!
Saturday I took the night off from Techi Nebuta so we could experience Aomori Nebuta with Glenn and Patti. Since we were going to Aomori City we figured we should build in a day of fun and hit up several 'touristy' spots. The following was all done in one day:
We made the 2 hour journey to Aomori city in the morning, and our first stop was the Sannai-Maruyama Site of the Jomon period. The Jomon period was approximately 12,000 years ago... talk about some history! The site is a re-built replica village of a very similar village that stood in the same spot 12,000 years ago.
This is a replica of a typical "hut", which was a large hole in the ground with a hut over a small portion of it. The people must have been small because the doors certainly were little!
This is a replica of the guards tower that stood here.
Like I've said before... we're big kids!! This is us playing in the museum :) 
The Jomon site was very interesting and hard to believe people lived such simple lives. From there we went up the road and changed pace a bit, we went to the Museum of Modern Art! I of course don't have any pictures because it's an strict art museum but it was very very cool! In case you're interested in the strange array of artistic collections, you can preview them here.
From there we switched back to traditional culture and we visited the Dainichi Buddha Daibutsu that was built in showa 59, or 1984. It's one of Japan's biggest buddhas. We have been here many times before but we wanted to show Glenn and Patti some Buddhist culture. The pagoda and temple at this site are equally wonderful.
This Buddha is 21m tall and is 220 tons of bronze!!
This is Eric and his parents in a beautiful garden next to the giant Buddha.
It was finally time for a real break, our feet were a little tired at this point so we made our way into the downtown area and had a wonderful dinner at Kappa Sushi. We had a bit of an interesting experience at dinner though, we kept ordering a few specialty items and the popular items that were gone by the time the sushi belt made it by our table... but they never came. We must have ordered the exam same thing 4 times in a row. We finally figured it out! There was a family sitting right next to the area that the special-order-train comes from and their 4 year old was hijacking our train and stealing our dinner!! Fortunately the chef caught on as well and had our order hand-delivered to us, and thankfully only one of them, not all 4. They must have really liked what we ordered, and they must have been very hungry! It was pretty entertaining once we finally got our order.
Our last stop of the evening was Aomori's Nebuta festival, a long-time traditional family event. For the first six nights of the week it works just like a normal festival with the floats parading through the city streets but, on the final night the parade is during the day and then at night the floats are loaded onto barges and paraded across the bay with a simultaneous fireworks show! It was SO cool! I didn't get any good pictures because the floats and fireworks very such bright moving lights against a totally black night sky and very dark ocean water. So you'll just have to imagine it!
After our 2.5 hour drive home our fun filled day came to an end and, by this point, that was a very good thing! We had quite a day visiting ancient and modern sites, art, archeology, architecture and a festival! Sunday was my final night of playing the drums at Techi Nebuta it was bittersweet, but mostly just made me really sad. I wish I could do something like this every year no matter where we live! Hopefully I'll find a Taiko group in the states that will let me join :) I'm bringing home my gear and have every intention of keeping the dream alive!
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