What I look forward to about Japan is the chance to experience its culture and traditions. The more unique, the more locally based, the more obscure, the better! Recently I was able to take part in one such event: The Ise Shrimp Festival!
Now, they may be called "shrimp" but they are actually lobster. It is a Lobster Fest! It entails lobster decorations, lobster themed dances, lobster hats (more like antenna hats), floats, Shinto lobster blessings, and fireworks (of course). People talked about it for weeks before it happened, I saw decorations, flags, and flyers go up everywhere in town. The shrimp anticipation was killing me! From all of the pictures and the posters, it was obvious that this was the biggest festival in this area, and I was definitely going to get in on the action!
Luckily for me, my Western middle school and its elementary school are in the town that hosts the Shrimp Festival. I made sure to join one of their dancing groups for the day's parade. At first I was worried that I would have to pick between going to the Sports Day of my Eastern middle school and the festival, but the timing worked out perfectly and I was easily able to attend both events even though they fell on the same day. After the Sport's Day ended, I dashed home, changed into my dancing team's 1980's-themed happi and a shrimp hat before going to meet up with the other teachers. They were impressed with my eagerness to perform, but we had met at 4 and weren't going to start dancing until around 7. I got quite a few looks of surprise as we walked through town, but luckily, I was with celebrities. The teachers are known and loved (well, at least respected) by everyone in town, so even my weird foreign self was immediately accepted since I was surrounded by the teacher-posse. On top of that, the young math teacher's wife had given birth just the day before, so all his current and former students swarmed him for pictures of the baby! In a small town, everyone knows everything, but even he was surprised that so many people knew in under 24 hours.
To kill time we went to one of the other teacher's houses for a major feast. I mean a huge feast! I mean the kind of feast the Tolkien would have written for his hobbits. Fish and rice and vegetables, more sake, beer, noodles, potato salad, sushi, more fish, more rice, desserts and rice crackers, everything by the boatload! I had no idea where it was all coming from, but it seemed endless. This particular teacher was not to join our dance group, but was with another set of performers with extravagant face paint and lots of decorations their costumes. I later found a photo of him on someone's blog (see left). Not only our group and his group, but many of his friends happened to come by for some food and drink. I munched away happily at my end of the table just listening to everyone else talk about who knew who, where they came from, "oh, you're so and so's daughter! I thought that you looked familiar." All the typical chatter that I've been missing since coming here. After the bounty that was our dinner, the other teachers changed into their outfits and we wondered down to the meeting place.
Not going to lie, when we got to the bridge, I was a little concerned that it was just going to be me and the teachers dancing along the road. Not that it would be a bad thing, but for five of us to be jumping about seemed odd to me. I was just about to voice this when along came some of my students, dressed in the same 80's happi and super surprised to see me! As we waited and took out place in line, more of them came, each with their weekend festival hairstyles and decorations. Some boys were sporting sunglasses and masks, others had colored and gelled hair for the day (something they are definitely not allowed to do during the school week) and were trying to wear their happi in interesting ways (rolled sleeves, off one shoulder) to look as cool as possible. The girls had done their hair in curls and fancy styles and some had stickers on their checks. You could tell who got ready with whom based on their accessories, but somehow we all ended up with glow sticks. Cool with me! I added mine to my Shrimp hat so that it glowed in my hair.
Waiting was the worst part, so I went around to the neighboring groups and took pictures or talked with them. Some people would sneak pictures of me when I wan't noticing and some people were considerate enough to ask me to pose first, but just in case I tried to stand straight and smile at all times. The students helped me learn the dance steps as we were waiting, but no one really wanted to stand by me at first, so I just jumped to the front of the group. The elementary schoolers and teachers were behind out group, so we were asked to jump as high as possible and be super energetic to set a good example for the younger ones. My kids were taking lots of pictures of themselves too, and some where trying to do the power shock picture that is so popular now, but the person who was helping them was too slow at snapping the shutter and couldn't get the timing for the jump right. I stepped in and took the photo with someone's iphone, getting much praise from the students (props for me!).
As we starte getting formed and lined up, I kept hearing them call out for the "Lottery Club".
Hmm, that is strange. Why would there be such a thing like that? I wondered. But there were a lot of members!
That club must be really rich if they all won the lottery! I thought. Wrong. It was the Rotary Club. Ooohhhh, I get it now. Another thing I was unsure about was why certain members of the students had slightly different outfits. Later I found out that it was because they were in the band and were going to perform at the end for the grand finale (which they did wonderfully in, might I add).
Once the music started, we still couldn't move forward until the was enough space in front of our group. The festival officials were there to give us the okay, but by that point I was so anxious to get started that I had already begun dancing in place and practicing my shrimp jumps. As we reached a certain point, the groups would pause for a rally. Most would cheer about how they'd be the loudest and most energetic, and some hand gestures or group movements that they performed. Of course, our students wanted to have a rally too, so we gathered all together, but no one wanted to lead. I guess this wasn't discussed about before hand, so no one had anything prepared to say or yell. Being myself, I jumped in the middle after letting them argue and decline for a while. Not thinking of anything cool to say at the moment, I decided to use my ultimate trump card:
English. I screamed out silly sentences like "This is a pen!!!" and "Are you ready??!" and "Let's go!" for a while. After every call I made, the students would scream out "Oooii!" or "Eeeehh!" and wait for me to give the final cry (which I did while doing a fist pump so that they would realize I was done). They really enjoyed getting to be the only group that could have a rally chant in English and got pumped up after our session. However, everyone had jumped the gun. We had all started cheering too early because the parade had been held up just a bit. So after everyone had gotten the proper spacing, and we all started to move again, the kids wanted another rally. Oh, boy. They all asked if I'd hop in again, which I was glad to do. I was so excited to get this party started that I let all my energy out in the yells. This time I had the students do a kamehameha at the end of it! They loved their new cheer and being the center of attention because of me. We started off our dancing with a lot of energy and started off just as the sun was setting.
As we marched, danced, and jumped along, we would periodically see other students standing on the sidelines. What?! Bystanders?! Not this time, kiddos. We allowed a few of the students to break formation to pull in their classmates into the dance. The kids we found were the one who were too cool to wear happi, too cool for shrimp hats, too cool for dances, but since we had made such a fuss about bringing them into the parade, and since we were all looking goofy together, they joined without any complaint.
We also had a shy camera boy follow us for the first third of our parade route. He had graduated from our middle school, but I wasn't sure if he was in high school or college yet. He kept taking picture after pictures of us, but he only pointed the camera at the front of the line, where myself and the sign leader were. It was a touch creepy, but it made me really focus on dancing properly. As the night grew darker and the crowd got thicker, he faded away, but others were sure to take his place.
As I danced, I'd hear to my right "Look, its a foreigner!" and hear the click-click of cameras going off. The older folks were quite confused and talked about me a bit, so I made sure to jump extra high and smile extra big for anyone who noticed me. Likewise, as I was scanning the crowd, I noticed some foreigners of my own: three boys in ghetto hats standing on the side of the road. One was bent over his camera, but I recognized him and another one right away as the ALTs from Toba (Facebook stalking has its perks). I broke formation this time to run over to them. "Hi, I'm Alexandra, the ALT in this area. Welcome to Hamajima! This is my group. Bye!" and dashed back again. They tried to get me to meet up with them later, but I didn't my Japanese phone with me and I wasn't sure what my teachers had planned for that evening. I didn't see them for the rest of the day, but we had already agreed on meeting up the next day for an international education event, so I wasn't too concerned about it.
After the dancers crossed the finish line, we were handed some tea, and gathered behind the main stage. We were told to go in order up on stage, split in two groups, then go down the stage to the pit area in front. I wasn't sure what was going on, but for some reason I was still the leader. Luckily, the girl behind me would tug on my sleeve to let me know where to go or if I was going too fast. Everyone was gearing up for the last batch of dancing as the group of us down in the pit grew larger and larger. We spiraled around the ground until everyone backstage was in our crowd and were then told to move to sides of the area. That is when the shrimps came out! The girl shrimp and boy shrimp danced around the area, bobbing and rocking as if they were alive, until they were finally placed on stands and we were allowed to join in the dance again. The problem was that in the very final dance segment, no one wanted to move because we were too interested in the hip-hop performers on stage. So we all bopped about and cheered until Pow Boom!!! Fireworks started exploding over the waters behind the stage. Everyone moved down to the beach to get a better view and visit the food stalls one last time. I became separated from my teachers, but I had the school's sign, so they found me again soon enough. We were required to make rounds around the festival and tell all the middle school students we found to go home before curfew. As we walked, most former students stopped to talk to my teachers and catch up on what had happened, so patrol took quite a while. One of my teachers was nice enough to buy me a snowcone. I must have really impressed them because for the next month, people mentioned that they had seen me performing on the local news and that of anyone from the Western school, I was the most excited to dance. I'd have to agree there. After the performance, I felt like I could have danced for another 2 hours, but everyone else was dead tired. I hope that I'll be around for other exciting festivals!
Look for my video footage on the blog. Things take awhile to work with youtube, but I'll get it online eventually.
Here are some of the pictures my friend Eric (one of the ALTs I spotted in the crowd) took at the time.
Interested in all things Ise Shrimp? Take your time by looking up the following links.
