Struggling

It's been hard for me to feel like blogging, all those complex emotions have been making it difficult to sit down and write about all of the good things that are going on right now. Last Saturday I went to Kakunodate, an old samurai village east of Akita, for their last festival of the fall, I'm still not sure what the name of the event was. It was very picturesque- really old houses and everyone dressed in their special outfit for the festival. It was a sort of community event that you only get from long standing tradition- each neighborhood had it own special float and clothing design and people worked together to haul these massive things down to a central location and then ram them together. It kind of made me think of a very wholesome and ancient Mardi Gras, without the free plastic stuff. There was all sorts of great festival food and all the usual kinds of games you see in the anime. I especially enjoyed my conically folded crepe filled with cream and blueberry sauce and crunchies- I could have gotten a fancier one with all kinds of fruit but I got tired of standing there sounding out katakana like an idiot. Another one of their great local specialties is kiritanpo or new rice on a stick, I happen to have a picture of my friend with one:
Pictures really speak better than words when it comes to describing a locale and it's sights, therefore I will just add some pictures.
This was my favorite float and it was the first one to do battle with a rival. I took a couple of short videos of the crashing, but the quality was bad, so I will just explain. Two floats faced each other, there were girls on the front deck of the float, directly below and in front of the figures, there was wild Japanese-style fluting and drumming and the two girls would dance gracefully, in unison, using their fans. After sufficient fan dancing had been done, two men would stand up and incite the pushers of the float with cheers and such, then they would ram into each other as hard as the could two or three times, and then the whole process would be repeated. I don't know how many times it was done, but I guess they stopped when sufficient damage had been done- every so often I saw a guy go by carrying nice, fresh, splintered chunks of wood from the direction of the battle.
I really liked the middle girl's golden hair ornament, it was like a rope, but it made me think of antlers. I saw another girl with a thinner silver and green rope tied into the shape of a phoenix in her hair, but I couldn't get a picture. The woman in front and on the left also had a neat hair style. This village had many women and men with more interesting, and slightly 80's, hair than I have seen anywhere else, there were even guys with pompadours. One woman's hair was piled on top of her head, and fizzy/poofy and sprayed with glitter- that also made me think of Mardi Gras.Even the kids get to get into the spirit- this boy has the name of his neighborhood shaved into the back of his head. I'm only a little surprised his family let him do that.

I find the dichotomy of Japan highly amusing- glued to technology while keeping traditions alive.
Kakunodate is a small place, I walked from one end to the other during my day there and it was a gently meander of a walk, with lots of back-tracking to look for my many straying comrades. Over twenty people from AIU went there together, mainly international students, but we broke up so that there were usually fewer than 7 of us in the same place at once. I wandered around and often wound up losing the people I was with only to discover a new set of people a little further in a different direction. I saw a few other foreigners at the festival but they mostly just gave me funny looks and kept to themselves- I had noticed that many foreigners have a tendency to acknowledge one another slightly, a sort of automatic recognition of someone living in a state similar to your own. I can't just play it cool and blend in here, I will always be highly visible and an object of scrutiny- with or without the purple hair.
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