Chicago Japan Festival 2019 🇯🇵

[dorchadas]

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:

Wagashi! The woman making these (website here) spent most of the time I was watching talking in Japanese to two very enthusiastic women, and I couldn't understand any of what they were saying due to the very loud enka singing taking place fifteen meters away.

The one part of this festival I really disliked was the tendency to fill every space with overly-loud music that made it near-impossible to have a conversation.

Wagashi are amazing, but they're annoying to make (there's a recipe here--it's not particularly difficult, just time consuming) and they keep for maybe a couple days at best. That means I can't buy them anywhere nearby and I can't have them shipped to me, and I don't want to put in all that effort to make them if I'm going to be the one who eats them, so I don't. I eat tahini halvah with my matcha since it has a similar texture to some wagashi.

I talked a bunch with the man behind the booth, who said that they were from Columbus and that he was hoping wagashi would blow up in America like sushi and then ramen had. I really hope so too--the day I can go to confectionery stores and get wagashi and matcha in America is the day that I go to a lot more confectionery stores.

The aforementioned panda kimono. It's a middle-schooler's spring kimono, back when children actually wore kimono to school. I didn't take a picture of the front, but I really liked the designs. Green haori, blue hakama, white lace undershirt, and the panda kimono pictured. I'd wear something like that if they made it in my size, which they do not, because I'm 196 cm tall.

But if they did. Kimono is surprisingly comfortable.

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.