道なき道: 七夕まつり (tanabata festival)

I prepared in advance for adventuring this last Saturday. The weekend before I did several loads of laundry and hung our futons outside to air out and get some sun, and got some cleaning done, knowing I wouldn’t get the chance the following weekend. My entire Friday evening after work was spent preparing the vocabulary and phrases I’d need to know to teach the CTR5 Primary children on Sunday.

All this to make certain the entire Saturday the 7^th was free for Tanabata festivities and other quests!

Saturday morning I woke bright and early to shower and get everything ready for a day-trip. (Somehow I still managed to forget the water bottles I’d put in the fridge Friday night...) Unfortunately, Drew couldn’t manage to wake up after sleeping poorly, so I bid him farewll and joined the others at the train station at 7:15. We boarded the 7:25 train in Oyama, made a switch in Yokohama, and arrived in Hiratsuka City at nearly 10am after 2 ½ hours of travel. Phew!

Now to prove this travel time was worth it!

For one thing, Oyama City doesn’t celebrate Tanabata. From what I’ve been able to gather, there was a point in time when two important men, one from a city in Ibaraki Prefecture and one from Oyama in Tochigi Prefecture, fought on the 7^th of July. The man from Oyama lost, so that day became a sad day for the people of Oyama, and Tanabata was not to be celebrated on such a day. (At least, that’s what I understood from one of my 4^th grade classes when I taught the Tanabata lesson today.) It’s been like that ever since. Though decorations do appear here and there, they have no festival.

Hiratsuka City’s Tanabata Matsuri (festival) is the most famous in the near-ish area. (I think Sendai’s matsuri is more famous for the West side of Japan, but it’s further away.) We arrived in Hiratsuka City surrounded by quite a crowd, and I only truly understood just how famous this festival was as we began to navigate Hiratsuka Station. They’d roped off areas for walking and had security guards directing the walking traffic to the correct exit (there were about a thousand signs pointing the way, so it seems this was mostly to keep those walking from crowding up the whole station).

station decorations

We exited and followed the crowd out onto several closed streets, and Tanabata glory unfolded before our eyes. I took nearly 150 photos, so to spare you all my sheer over excitement, I’m only posting the bests.

entrance to the festival from station side

some traditional culture - Tale of Genji decorations

detail below Genji

matsuri street

dragon boat

melon characters

traditional art on decorations

Hikeboshi and Orihime decorations

my favorite of the traditional pictures

giant cranes! with strings of tiny cranes in the streamers

Japanese fairy tale decoration

lamp posts on the outer streets

Momotarou

At one point, we passed a store with these “mystery presents” piled in baskets outside of it. Each present box was 300 yen. The prizes could be really cool (3DS, Disneyland tickets, Blu-Ray player ticket, etc.) or really lame (fake glasses, various toys, bobby pins, planners, toy cars, and who knows what else!). I got 3 cute planners for 2012, bobby pins, fake glasses, and tiny scissors. Haha! Granted, these “lame” things were still good for laughs, so it was great fun!

me and my mystery boxes

At the food stalls we stopped for something to munch on. I had okonomiyaki for the first time. Cabbage fried in batter, an egg cracked over it all, with ketchup and mayonnaise on top. Tasty! Good thing I shared with two others though – the thing was huge! We also bought some yakisoba wrapped in a thin layer of fried egg, which also had ketchup and mayonnaise on top (the Japanese love their mayo, and I find more and more that I rather approve!). We also got taiyaki parfait desserts, and I got cold pineapple on a stick, as well as my Rilakkuma cotton candy.

street with food booths

stall with cucumber, tomatoes, or pineapple on a stick

taiyaki parfait banner

Rilakkuma cotton candy

Tanabata is also a day for making wishes. People write their wishes on colored pieces of paper and hang them up along string tied between trees, on the bamboo decorations, and some even wrote directly on the streamers they helped make!

awesome decorations, with wishes along the left

wishes!

Disney makes its way into everything (:

Tokyo Tower and Ultraman

the Brazilians of Japan represent themselves

more Disney - Snow White

hard to tell, but these have lights in the streaamers

windy day

Did I mention all of these decorations are hand-made every year?

yukata - and Karen!

old (yukata) and new (cell phones)

so cute! some the few young girls with an actual obi tie on their yukata

character candies

After all this excitement, we headed back to the station, escaping the ever-growing crowds. I’m sure you noticed the foreboding sky in many of those pictures, and I’m glad to say that despite the day’s forecast and those threatening clouds, we only got a very light mist rain during our time at the festival!

We got on a train back to Tokyo then, napping a bit on the way. Next stop: Akihabara Electric Town. A.k.a., “Nerd Paradise”. We went to a few small stores there. The first was full of collector’s stuff – figurines, plushies, charms, etc. Another had over-priced English video games. The last was full of collector’s items for popular animated televisions or movies series here. Most of the stuff I like is old news, but I did find a few things to get myself, the best being this 25^th Anniversary deck of Final Fantasy playing cards.

Sometimes traversing the pop culture areas can be a lot of fun (as long as it’s not too often, and not in the weird stores!). It came time for dinner, and we went to the top floor of a shopping center to choose from the several restaurants up there. We all agreed on a place called Pepper Lunch, where you buy your food tickets from a machine, pick a seat at the food bar, and hand the tickets to the nearest worker. Not long after that, the only-partly-cooked food is brought out on a hot iron plate set in a wooden tray. You cook your meet and stir your food all together, adding the spices and sauces you desire, then enjoy! The best part: it never got cold!

A few floors down, we looked at various toys and gacha-gacha machines before heading back to the station. At last it was time to go home. (I was missing my husband badly by this point, and wondering how depressed he was going to be that he hadn’t come along.) We arrived back in Oyama to be greeted by rain, so the walk was a bit wet.

Then my stuff somehow exploded.