Ian Lewis' Blog

This past Saturday Reiko and I went to the Awaodori Festival in Kouenji with our friends at the Japanese-English Language and Culture Meetup. Awaodori is a type of dance that originated in the Shikoku island of Japan (One of Japan's four main islands) but has become a staple of summer festivals all around Japan.

It's kind of a silly kind of dance with lots of different variations but in it's basic form involves a kind of walking where you put your right arm forward when stepping with your right foot and the same with your left. The patters emerge from that, some involving somewhat elaborate dances with lanterns.

The dancers are followed by drummers, flautists, and small gong like bell ringers. Essentially the beat of the processing dancers is kept up by the percussionists that follow them. I uploaded some movies so you can get the idea.

Anyway, Reiko and I really enjoyed it. It seems to be a Japanese staple summer festival along with fireworks and Obon dancing. Though, being a staple event in the most populated metropolitan area in the world means that the event was horrendously crowded. There was a never ending line of people coming out of the station which gave the police the rather unforgiving task of crowd control and security (in this day and age a large crowd of people is a terrorist bullseye). There were so many people that they had to set up a route for which the people could walk as to not jam up while meeting friends. But there are always those who don't want to follow the rules and go wherever they please without obeying the wishes of festival organizers.

However, managed to keep at least a semblance of a complete group, and found ourselves a nice spot to watch the parading dancers. Japan in the summertime is humid, stuffy and hot, but fun you have drinking and hanging out with friends at the summer festivals makes up for it.