Okaisshiki Festival

Indigo James and me were invited to participate in a neighborhood festival. Our neighborhood is called Okaisshiki. Jodi was there for the experience until the heat and walking became tiresome. We walked, chanted, blew whistles and rang bells for close to three hours. "Gan batte" is an expression to describe an essential and basic Japanese characteristic. Basically it means persevering, or even suffering, in the face of a challenge, obstacle or anything that requires effort. We didn't quite suffer. But the sun was hot, and we did pound the pavement for three hole hours. We bowed out (literally) just before the party at the neighborhood shrine where there was to be games, food and cold drinks for everyone. We were done. The day trip to Yokohama the day before combined with all the walking left us feeling completely shot. It was neat the neighborhood organizers invited us and wanted to include the foreigners. I feel we represented ourselves quite well. We did our best to embody the "gan batte" spirit. The video documents the neighborhood kids carrying a mini-shrine from house to house raising a huge racket (with whistles, bells and chanting) to let the occupants know we were there and ready to collect a donation...I think the donation goes to support the event and maintaining our neighborhood Shinto, or Buddhist shrine. Indigo was very much enthusiastic about the noise pollution for about 20 minutes...then he started asking how much longer do we have to do this? He hung in there with my encouragement for quite a while. I wanted to bail much earlier than we did, but felt it was necessary to honor the invitation as fully as we could. How Japanese of me, no?!