I had a long, detailed write-up on this event. Then I accidentally overwrote it, and I don't want to rewrite it all over again. So, here's the short version. On Sunday, Kagoshima had their Aki no Saiten (Fall Festival), which is part of the 150th anniversary for the Meiji Restoration activities. Part of the event consisted of cultural and history activities, there was some food, and the main stage event was the contest to name a Saigo Takamori look-alike winner.
Yuyu-buu. "Buu" is the Japanese version of "oink."
In Kagoshima, "Segodon" is the dialectical form of "Saigo." Here, you can have your photo taken with Segodog.
One of the booths was kind of a reading room/library.
One table was a workshop, where you could paint little Saigo statues made from compressed volcano ash.
Two different chalk interpretations of Saigo.
Another view of the reading booth.
Suna-buu
Photo cut-out board for the Saigo look-alike Grand Prix.
Get yer Saigo t-shirt here.
The Grand Prix was popular.
The emcees (I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that the guy on the left is one of Saigo's great-great-great grand kids. But, maybe not.)
Some of the entrants. It's so hard to decide - they all look so qualified!
The finalists.
Part of the contest was based on looks. But, there was also a trivia question phase. I didn't stick around to see who won.
After the Grand Prix, there was a Japanese calligraphy demo by a high school club (see video below), followed by a costumed heroes show.
The Guree-buu foamhead mascot comes on stage to introduce the heroic Hayato Kenshin. He's interrupted by a kitsune (Japanese fox trickster) whose name translates to arrogant coward.
Coward puts a seal on Guree-buu's forehead to turn him weak-willed and helpless.
Coward's minions then appear and put similar stickers on the faces of all the children in the audience.
Eventually, Hayato arrives to save everyone and there's big fake stage battle. When it looks like Hayato is going to lose, the audience is told to cheer for him. He recovers and beats up the minions. Coward promises to mend his ways (until the next stage show).
As I wrote above, I had a lot more stuff written up here. You'll just have to imagine how fascinating it was. Better luck next time.
Edit: The music on the below video that the calligraphy group used during their performance was the theme song for the NHK Seigodon TV drama. Naturally, NHK blocked the video due to copyright. The thing is, they could have just told youtube to mute that part of the soundtrack. Instead, they insisted on blocking the entire video in all 248 countries. So, I deleted the previous video, stripped off the audio track and then re-uploaded it to youtube. This is why I hate recording music events in Japan - copyright isn't enforced uniformly.
Direct youtube link
No comments:
Post a Comment