Life In Japan: Yosakoi Festival

The fun and excitement never lets up here. This past weekend, there was another festival here in Tambasasayama, a somewhat unusual one. Mind you, the previous weekend we had our splendiforous, annual Cherry Blossom Festival, celebrating — you guessed it — the blooming of the cherry blossom trees, which populate the landscape here in the thousands. So, neither Masumi or I expected yet another festival so soon.

I should point out that Masumi warned me that this surprise festival, the Yosakoi Matsuri, is a noisy, obnoxious affair. Specifically, the music is loud, grating, and frankly impossible to categorize. It’s modern, has a big cosmic beat, uses modern instrumentation, and borrows from multiple genres — hip hop, electropop, jazz, rock — occasionally hints at “traditional” Japanese music without sounding in the least traditional. Its primary purpose is to support the dancing and flag waving on and near to the main stage. In terms of the dancing, there we see again, a blend of dance moves drawn from all over the map. There’s a short video at the end of this article, which offers the overall “look” but is not at all representative of most of the performances. It has a very traditional vibe. Most of the rest of the dancing looked like high school dance teams.

Anyway, it’s all good fun. People seem to enjoy the performance, though the music reminded me I need to carry my earplugs wherever I go. You just never know.

Here are some random shots of the festival . . .

And here is a very short video of the type of action we saw on stage . . .

There you have it, folks. What can I say? Life in Japan, out here in the countryside, never loses its charm.

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[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Life In Japan: Yosakoi Festival | John Rachel

Life In Japan: Otsuka Museum of Art

Japan continues to dazzle and amaze me. This past weekend, Masumi took me to the Otsuka Museum of Art, and it was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. It is located on Shikoku island and until recently was the largest art facility in Japan, 29,412 square meters (316,588 square feet).

This museum has extremely high-quality reproductions, a collection of all of the greatest paintings of the West. If they left one out, I don’t know what it is. It embraces a span of over two millennia, from Egyptian and Greek antiquities up through the modern art of the 20th Century. As the museum explains: “The museum houses over one thousand reproductions of treasured Western artworks specially selected by a six-member committee, from ancient frescoes to modern paintings in the collections of more than 190 galleries in 26 countries around the world.”

To capture the exact color of the originals, they use photographic imaging which is then transferred to ceramic panels. Any anomalies are expertly touched up by hand, the entire process guaranteeing faithfulness to the originals and permanence. These reproductions will stand up over time infinitely better than the original paintings themselves. They will retain their color and resolution for 2000 years.

The facility is so huge, to view all of the galleries, requires walking 4 kilometers (2 1/2 miles)! And get this. Every single painting is life-size. Yes . . . the exact size as the original.

They even have a full-scale model of the Sistene Chapel. I’ve been in the Sistene Chapel in Vatican City and it was astonishing to see it replicated perfectly.

By the way, the grounds — which includes the roof of the complex — are also quite stunning.

In any case, here is just a tiny sampling of the 1000+ works of art on display.

I was so overwhelmed by all of the Christian art, I dropped to my knees for the first time in over a half century.

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Life In Japan: Otsuka Museum of Art | John Rachel