too many festivals

In the past five days I have been at two different festivals: Hakodate's Minato Matsuri (Port Festival) celebrating Commodore Perry's forceful opening of Hakodate's port some 150 years ago that helped spark the modernization of Edo-period Japan, and Aomori's Nebuta Matsuri (Float Festival) which features enormous paper floats lit up at night with internal lights depicting scenes from old tales involving ogres, dragons, and samurai all fighting each other. The highlight of the Minato Matsuri is the Ika Odori (Squid Dance), which is open to anyone with the desire to jump around in the streets to music with an obnoxious singer singing about squid. As you can imagine, this was exactly my cup of tea. I wrote a short piece inspired by the Ika Odori the other day:

The music blaring from the megaphone vans resounded through the cool night air, booming in the ears of the squid dancers, who were dressed in a variety of eccentric garb, ranging from handmade representations of squids themselves complete with dangling paper tentacles, to black coats with Halloween masks. Although from the inside of the bumping mass of dancers everything seemed chaotic and unrehearsed, from the outside everyone more or less followed the same dance routine, prompted by an energetic announcer shouting encouragement and repetitious chants from a podium atop the moving van.The unavoidable thirty-second song that dictated the dance moves was characterized by a sassy-sounding singer with a friendly country twang singing over electric guitar riffs and electronic beats. Sweat was flying, costumed power rangers of all colors were leaping, men with excessive make-up and grapefruit breasts were all hopping to the left, then the right.
Before I got involved all we saw were dancing troops that were quite well coordinated. I was initially standing with some gaijin friends on the sidelines when the squid dancing crowd spit out a fellow classmate, who must have been swallowed on her way to the station and upon seeing us expressed her fervent desire to join the dancing in their contagious prancing and vigorous stepping, but lamented the lack of opportunity for a group of street-clothed gaijin to jump into a group of coordinated dancers with matching costumes. It seemed less than appropriate to barge in and selfishly ruin the synchrony for the unjustifiable reason that we wanted to dance too. In effect, she assumed that we all wanted to dance with equal desire, and it was probably a safe assumption: we had been standing there gawking at the festivities smiling and gape-jawed with eyes asparkle and leg muscles tense. The mood was saturated with anticipation. So when the coordinated troops has passed and a shrieking, leaping crowd of varied wear, zealous air and dubious manners reared their mass at the head of the parade street led by a huge van displaying cartoon squids in festival dress, we knew that this was our chance.

It's kind of in reverse, but that just adds to the anticipation. I will write about the Nebuta Matsuri a bit later, as time is now running thin, but it was equally as thrilling. Love to all.