As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Bonobos sakura festival was held here in Mito over the first weekend in April. Starting 3 years ago, the owner of Gokoku Shrine and local band The Dodoittsu began organizing this hanami event in hopes to bring more young people out for the shrine’s annual sakura festival. The event began as a one day affair featuring The Dodoittsu as headliners and various local acts performing in front of the shrine building, and it has grown steadily ever since. This year there was a total of three days of entertainment featuring music, dance, and various performance pieces. I’ll try to break it down for you day-by-day.
Friday night featured mostly dance acts from local studios with a mix of hip-hop, belly dance and many other styles. To be honest, I didn’t make it Friday so I can’t say much about it. I do know however that it marked the first appearance of a woman whom I’ll call The Diva. Apparently she’s an opera singer from Kansai, and although she wasn’t scheduled to perform, she suddenly appeared at the event and demanded that the organizers let her on stage. I didn’t see the Friday performance, but if the next two nights can stand as an example, it couldn’t have been pretty.
Saturday opened with beautiful weather and warm temperatures. It seemed to be ‘culture day’ and featured many varied acts, focusing on dance. Early on, the crowd was wowed by Thai dance troupe, Rujira. As the sun got low in the sky, a jazz band played a short set to keep the crowd warmed up, and the rain started. This being the time of year for scattered evening showers in Japan, Bonobos is frequently plagued by rain, but the organizers were prepared this year and quickly prepared tents to cover the acts, setting the stage for the best performance of the night. Fire dancers! The group, called Mela, features fire and crystal ball dancing backed by some very spacy psychedelic music. While most of the crowd was relatively miserable standing in the rain, the dancers instantly perked everyone up with their twirling, water-defying flames. Mela finished their routine to raucous applause and then the crowd was treated to perhaps the worst following act in history. The Diva returned. The performance this time around was no worse than the last, but the audience reacted with open laughter. As bad as it was, I honestly just felt bad for her and was greatly relieved when she finally left the stage (after throwing a paper cup at us, which of course just made everyone laugh harder).
Sunday was the day for bands, and we were thankfully spared the rain this time around. After a few decent, but unremarkable opening acts, we were given the unfortunate news that The Dodoittsu wouldn’t be headlining as planned because one of the members was laid up with a fever. Instead three members of the band with a guest bassist filled an earlier slot with what seemed to be some improvisation. The result? Well… がんばった (they did their best). The Diva reared her head again, but it was thankfully an early and short set. Afterwards Mono (not the instrumental band) from Yokohama took the stage and played an excellent set of original funk tunes. I’d love to give some details about the bands that came between this and the final act, but I do believe I overindulged in the overflowing wooden cups of the local nihonshu, Ippin. I think maybe there was more fire dancing. My unprofessionalism (read: crippling alcoholism) aside, the final act, Megu(Swing), did a great job of riding atop the party atmosphere wave and closed the night out with a bang. All in all, another great time had at this unique sakura festival. I’m looking forward to next year!
The next big event coming to Ibaraki is the massive fireworks tournament being held at Hitachi Seaside Park on May 30th. Check the website here for details.
Ibaraki-ben of the day:
Now that I’ve thoroughly bored you with lengthy pronunciation descriptions, onto the vocabulary!
Today’s word is でれすけ (deresuke) which is Ibaraki-ben for だらしない (darashinai {sloppy, slovenly}).
Let’s use it in a sentence:
おめぇでれすけっぺよ！omee deresukeppeyo (You damn slob!)
