One thing we started to notice when the weather heated up was an explosion of people wearing yukata. Yukata are light-weight summer kimono. Women's yukata are usually brightly coloured, with bold patterns. They are fastened with a broad obi tied around the waist with a sizable bow at the back. Men's yukata are more muted, and the sash is narrower and tied around the hips. To deomstrate the difference, here's a couple of photos of me and my work buddy, Barrie, in our yukata. The school we were working at that day was having a yukata week, so most of the staff were wearing yukata, and the teachers were invited to as well.
(Yeah, yeah, not exactly tradtitional footwear. Mostly you see people wearing the old-skool wooden things, but you do see crocs and more modern sandals too. Even high heels.)
My bow is a bit wonky, but I tied it myself, you know. Not easy!
Of course, wearing yukata to work isn't all that common... I think the most common place to wear them is to festivals. There are festivals all over the place at the moment. Every weekend, there's something going on somewhere. Lots of little stalls set up, selling food like yakisoba, yakitori, okonomiyaki, takoyaki – pretty much all the 'yaki' you could hope for – plus fried chicken, toffee apples, and even iced cucumbers on sticks. Oh, and beer of course! Another really popular summer food is shaved ice with flavoured syrup – basically, sno cones.
Not all the stalls sell food – some sell masks, or have games to win prizes. The games usually revolve around getting something (eg. a goldfish, a bouncy ball) from a tub of water into a bowl using a net made of tissue paper.
Last weekend, we went to Himeji (so I could see the castle) and it happened to be the Himeji Castle Festival. Along with all the stalls, there was a big stage with dance performances. The costumes were colourful, and the dancers were highly energetic. It was great fun to watch.
Here are some of the off-duty dancers hanging out in their awesometastic costumes:
Another festival-y kind of activity is going to see fireworks. We went to see some last night, at a town called Otsu on the shore of Lake Biwa, Japan's largest lake. It was called Biwako Dai-Hanabi Taikai (basically 'Massive-arse Biwako Fireworks'), and I don't know how many people were there but it was expected that there would be about 350,000. It sure was jam packed. Holy moly. You could barely move. We turned up three hours early, and we got a pretty good spot, but all the really good ones had been long taken by then. And the place just kept filling up. It was phenomenal.
The fireworks were pretty and shiny, as fireworks are. There were some cat-shaped ones, and some fish-shaped ones, and some smiley-face-shaped ones. The booms and bangs echoed off the building across the street behind us, and you could feel every one in your spine. They went on for a good, solid hour. And when everyone thought we'd just seen the grand finale, they came out with some more bang. At one point, there was so much smoke from prior fireworks that it was actually obscuring the view of the next ones.
