Chicago Japan Festival 2019 🇯🇵

Sunday was the Chicago Japan Festival, formerly held in Arlington Heights for years but now relocated to Millennium Park. That meant that this was the first year I was able to attend, and so I did.

I arrived at the south end of the outdoor festival location and met up with meowtima, pinandstutter, and saintofsnark after fighting my way through the crowds, exacerbated by the organizers clearing a space for a dance right in the middle of the already extremely-crowded area. Overly-expensive gyūdon in hand, I walked with them to the Chicago Cultural Center where the indoor part of the festival was taking place, and we looked at a wagashi-maker demonstrate her craft, checked out a kimono display from the Chicago Wafū Club (including a panda-patterned spring schoolgirl's kimono, styled after the kimono popular during the Taishō Era), listened to Haruna Ai sing enka, and forced our way through the crowds. After we checked out the indoor exhibitions, everyone else had seen enough and left, so I went back to the outdoor area to do another sweep and as I was looking at the food lines, I ran into sgtsticklyman!

We went back to the Cultural Center after just missing an iaidō demonstration, because that's where I thought the cosplay contest that Anime Chicago was meeting at was going to be, but it turned out I was wrong. We missed the entire contest--including the extremely cute bunch of kids dressed as the Mario characters--but I did get to see a demonstration of tea ceremony indoors, which was fantastic. Once I realized my mistake, we went back outdoors to where spacedragon and a couple others were, but they were about to leave since there was an anime cover band (called Pika Pika) and the results of the cosplay contest were delayed. I similarly left when after Pika Pika was done, a group of traditional dancers came on. We went back to the Cultural Center, I talked with some people for a bit, listened to the koto concert, and then left.

I took a bunch of pictures, but a lot of them are more suitable to jog my memory of the event than they would be to post here--performances but from the back row, or the tea ceremony location but with no one demonstrating, and so on. The pictures that are probably the most representative of the festival to me are these two:

( Sweet and cute )

The festival was extremely crowded, and spacedragon said that at Mitsuwa they had more space. But it certainly was harder to get to then, so I'm glad they moved it. And hearing people speaking Japanese around me, with food booths shouting "Irasshaimase!" was incredibly nostalgic. But I wish there had been more variety of food and I wish the festival space had been larger. Maybe next year, it will be.