Kitsune no yomeiri

The foxy festival! Since it is a fox festival the townspeople go all out and assume fox form. On the day of the festival you can go into 711, the post office or even the police station and see men and women painted up like foxes. All festival workers, all performers and many participants have their faces painted. My supervisor (who is a town employee) spent the day (which was a holiday) painting town workers faces. I decided to join the throng and made Minori and Aiko come along. Apparently there are those who are really good at painting faces and those who are really bad. Mine was good and Minori's was bad according to the gals, I didn't see much difference. There were only a few foreigners at the festival and a multitude of old Japanese men with cameras so I was often swarmed with gigantic lens in my face. I have never seen so many people with fabulously huge cameras as in Japan. I was even asked to speak English for a video. It is somewhat annoying and it makes me wonder where these pictures will end up. I guess that is what I get for being the blue-eyed fox.

Minori, Aiko and I with James' stupid love bone. Honestly the blow up bone says love on it. He got it from a junior high school girl!

There were many booths with amazing food (very very good beef) and performances throughout the day before the procession. This is a yosakoi group from Mikawa. A couple of my students' parents are members of the group and asked me to join at the enkai last Friday. I enjoy dance and am in for learning aspects of Japanese tradition so I was excited about the invite...before I saw them dance. It was an odd mixture between yosakoi and hip hop. It look very difficult and extremely ridiculous. It was not in time with the music, very random and just not my thing. Aiko informed me that yosakoi was started by the yakuza very recently and is not a type of traditional Japanese dance anyhow.

My students that are in the yosakoi group.


A group of foxes. Tomoko (Iwan's gf), me, Minori, Aiko and Evan.

Scott got into the spirit it being his last year and all.

The Mikawa taiko group also played at the festival and once again I found my taiko group is much better. When we began taiko the members had informed us that the Mikagura taiko group is very good and has played some really big festivals. I was very skeptical (as I tend to be at these claims) but the more I see taiko the more I believe it. We have a couple events in June and July so perhaps we will see other groups!