Arirang Festival

Every year, Tsushima has the Arirang festival. Named after a famous Korean song--there's a video of it here--it's a celebration of friendship with Korea. No other place in Japan has this festival, mainly because no other part of Japan is as close to Korea (50km) as Tsushima.

The festival falls on the first weekend of August. A large plot of land next to the seaport is used for the event, with a large stage put up for music and dance performance. Lots of tents are set up near the stage, offering food and typical carnival gimmicks--games and trinkets. The fairground area is open Saturday evening and all day Sunday.

I still didn't have a camera, so all these pictures I'm linking to are from Joe's.

The food sold includes french fries; corn dogs (called furencchi doggu, or "French dog"); fried chicken; snow cones with free condensed milk topping; skewers of grilled chicken, beef, and veggies; plum-filled pastries; takoyaki, fried dumplings with diced octopus; and okonomiyaki, an omelet-like dish with cabbage, diced octopus and shrimp.

This year there were games like "pay $1 to draw, from a huge pile of cards, one card whose number matches a prize that just might be a Wii (unless we happened to remove that number from the pile) but will probably be a plastic noisemaker." There's probably a simpler name for it, but I think combining the explanation and the name saves space. They also had the game where you toss a ball into a cup and win a goldfish.

Sunday is the day of the parade. Lots of folks from Tsushima, and some from Korea, get together and parade around in really nifty costumes. Even though I've seen two of these parades now, I still have no idea if there's any big significance to the costumes, other than their being old-style traditional Korean and Japanese garb. I'm pretty sure these are Japanese, while these, these, and these are Korean. There were also ridiculously cute little girls in bright dresses with fans. Some local women were in dresses, too. Don't mind their lack of smiles--it was pretty hot that day, even for those of us without layers of traditional clothing on.

The parade also had a group of dancers carrying small drums. They'd bounce around, banging the drums in unison, while a guy played a very bagpipes-sounding horn. What made this even cooler was that some of the girls had special hats with swiveling attachments on top. The attachments had a long streamer coming off it, so they could flail this ribbon around with their heads, while still bouncing around and playing the drums.

Even the non-parading townsfolk dressed up for the occasion, with almost every girl wearing yukata. I saw lots of my students, and it was a little disorienting to see the girls all dolled up--they aren't allowed to wear much/any makeup at school, and of course they're always in their uniforms. The second-year girls, one of whom thinks it insults me to call me Adam Smith, stopped for a photo op.

After the parade, the six of us--Joey, Aaron, Evelyn, Rose, Joe, and I--hung out by the stage, idly watching the performances but mostly people-watching. Among the highlights were a shy-looking diminutive twentysomething mother wearing a tank top that said "F*** YOU YOU F***ING F***"--minus the *s--who was pushing a stroller with her toddler in it. Joey, as you can tell in the picture, stood out a bit in the crowd. There had apparently been a big arm-wrestling match earlier in the day, so the competitors from that--deceptively slim-looking sailors with Popeye forearms--tried talking Joey into taking them on.

As the sun set, everyone gathered around the stage. There were professional-looking groups who sang and danced, as well as groups of elementary students who did a much cuter job of singing and dancing. There was an awesome taiko drum performance toward the end. As darkness finally fell, a super-secret surprise celebrity guest came out. None of the Americans recognized her, and judging by the crowd's response, not many people knew her at all. Or maybe everyone just wanted to see the fireworks that were coming. She sang a song or two, and we humored her with token applause. She wasn't a bad singer, but it's kind of hard to outdo a fireworks display.

The two emcees finally counted down to the fireworks. I don't have any pictures to prove it, but... wow. It was flat-out spectacular. I'm sure I appreciated it a lot more because I hadn't seen fireworks since the Fourth in 07, but everyone agreed it was a great show. We found it hard to believe that an otherwise upper-lower-class/lower-middle-class island like Tsushima could afford such a big expenditure. Most of the fireworks were launched from boats in the harbor, which was only a couple of hundred feet away from us. Maybe that's what made it so amazing--we were right under the show. The finale featured a steel tower that had streamers arranged to spell, basically, "We <3 Tsushima!"

It was a lot of fun. It seems I'm doomed not to have any pictures of my own from this: last year's were lost when my computer died in October, and this year my camera was dead. Since the festival is in August, my contract will have expired by next year. Maybe I'll stay long enough to see it one last time...