Cooking, culture, and cosplay, oh my!

Alright folks, C and I have started a food blog called Chotto..., and all of my subsequent recipes will be posted over there, so as not to clog up this blog.

This weekend, I went to a festival in Osu, which is a shopping district near the Osu Kannon Buddhist temple in Nagoya. I had never been there before, but I am determined now to go back: there are several streets which comprise a covered shopping arcade, full of the most diverse and cheap-o shops I've seen around here yet. The whole place is like a riotous flea market - even more so this weekend, with the festival.

I may have mentioned this before, but summer in Japan is one festival after another. It's an endless string of town festivals, all with their own traditions, but there are certain constants: usually fireworks (unless, like Osu, you're in the very middle of a giant city), food vendors (fried chicken, fries, snow cones, meat-on-a-stick and takoyaki* are the staples), and dancing. Each town tends to have their own variations of traditional songs and dances, and they're quite awesome to watch. However - I don't know if I've said this before - Nagoya is home to a large Brazilian population, due to a Japanese diaspora that developed in Brazil before the world wars: many Japanese from this area immigrated, and now, half a century later, the reverse is happening. So in Osu, there was a samba parade - and I got to stand right in the front row as they came down the street. I'd say there were more Japanese people than Brazilian in the parade, but there was a good showing, and the costumes were amazing.

Also at the festival was some truly excellent taiko-style drumming. Most of the performers were young, and the muscles on them were unbelievable. Taiko not only sounds amazing, but looks fantastic: there's a certain aesthetic to it, how one moves around the drum and what one does with ones drumsticks in between beats, and it was so fascinating to watch. It has almost a certain poetry to it - if I were a kid growing up in Japan, I'd definitely want taiko to be one of my extracurriculars.

Through all of this, I was in fact wearing a yukata; earlier that afternoon, C, Shinobu (my lovely coworker and friend) and I had met at my apartment and snacked on discount grapes and a sweet cornbread cake that I made while Shinobu dressed us in our yukata. Yukata are, as one of my students said to me, made for Japanese people who are "short and round" and not western girls who are tall and skinny - Shinobu padded our waists out with towels so we could achieve proper roundness before we even put the yukata on. Yukata are very long; one wears them by folding the material up around one's waist until it's possible to walk about without tripping. Then, it's secured by way of two cloth ties, and wrapped over with an obi, which is quite complicated to tie, but when it's done, it looks lovely. It took about an hour and forty-five minutes for both Caitlin and I to be properly outfitted (Shinobu had shown up in her own yukata), and then we tiptoed off to the subway - because you are sheathed to the ankles in yukata fabric, it's quite hard to get anywhere fast in them, and so we were forced to take tiny, ladylike steps, which look very elegant and refined but are totally useless when one is in 36-degree weather under the hot sun and the subway is five minutes away by walking.

In any case, we made it - and after the festival in Osu, we made it even further to Oasis 21 in Sakae, where the World Cosplay Championships were happening. We wandered about, gandering at multitudes of people with improbable hairstyles and colours and dressed in all sorts of strange outfits, and then we actually got to Oasis 21 and saw some cosplayers. They were super impressive, but I didn't see many that I recognized, since the scene is quite different here in terms of what's popular and what's passe. The costumes were superb, however - if one is to cosplay here, one doesn't half-ass it. There was also a lot of crossplaying that was not immediately apparent; quite a few times the girl in the spectacular maid outfit with the platform heels turned out to actually be a dude, and the vast majority of male videogame characters were, in fact, women. This was hard to discern unless one looked closely, however.

After all was said and done, we then ended the night at the Hub, a British pub in Sakae, with a bunch of other gaijin, teachers and non-teachers alike. I was exhausted so I ended up turning in early, but it was a good day, all told.