8.14.2010

Japan's Crappiest Summer Festival


Japan has a lot of summer festivals. its supposed to distract us from the absurd heat but it really doesn't. anyway, they are generally kinda fun; food stalls, games, the japanese idea of line dancing, etc. it was in the paper so my roomie and i got all dolled traditional style and decided to check out a festival in Itabashi, a 3 minute train ride from out station.


when we got to the station, there were no visible signs of a festival ANYWHERE. i was flushed with momentary panic thinking i'd dragged us out there for no reason but we decided to walk around a bit to see if we can't find it. we searched for roughly 15-20 mins and finally found a small shotengai (shopping street) where the festival was.

the word "festival" was used very loosely here. we're talking a handful of kids and an old dude doing the same dance twice (its the equivalent of the japanese macarena but with far less booze and speed -- has the same catchyness factor though), 4 drums, one beer stand, and one yakisoba stand with the world's shittiest fried noodles.




cheech is ever the optimist though, and even a crap festival won't get her down (as long as there's beer). so we loaded up and decided to walk to Sugamo which i thought was closer than it was -- the blisters on my feet tell a very different story. Sugamo is old people town but they have a pretty rockin' shotengai and cheech was pretty sure they'd have a festival of some kind going on.

but they didn't. it was like walking though a ghost town.

having walked all that way, delirious from hunger and thirsty for beer, we decided to give a short prayer at togenuki jizo (the line for this is usually super long with olds -- you polish the parts of the stone statue that ails you and you're supposed to be cured)


cheech gives a prayer at the temple:




we decided to eat at this "asian" restaurant called kumasan (mr. bear) because she'd been there before. a friendly nepalese man gave us a window seat (the restaurant was so empty that we could have sat anywhere we wanted) next to a wall that looked like every stereotypical asian artifact had thrown up all over it.

SIDEBAR: never eat at an "asian"restaurant. in fact never eat at a restaurant touting the food of an entire continent. there's a reason my we have different restaurants for different foods of different countries.

between the sticky floor and table, salty clams, and over curious staff, i can't say i will be going back there again but the comedy of an utterly failed attempt at an evening out (plus beer!) assuaged my embarrassment a bit. cheech seemed to have had a splendid time of it all so i shall ride on the coattails of her joy and say, yep, it was a pretty good night.

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