Oiden/Arimatsu

Summer time in Japan means festival time. Each town does their festival a little differently. Oiden （おいでん）in Toyota means dancing food and best of all fireworks. The festivities begin a few weeks before the actual festival when different groups audition to be in the "parade". This is not your typical parade with kids throwing candy and girls riding in convertibles. This consists of groups doing synchronized dancing in the street. They make it a competition and at the end of the evening they announce the winner. Here are a couple of pictures of the auditions.
This is from Day One of the actual festival. The lady to the left with a purple ribbon on her hat is the mother of one of my students. Their group was really good.

After the dancing was over I wandered around Toyota a bit. A friend showed me this shrine that I had never seen before. And there were more booths set up with food and stuff.
Day Two of the festival is when everyone came out for fireworks. These people are sitting in the street. I have never seen so many people in Toyota. It was absolutely packed.
More crowds.


THE FIREWORKS. Fireworks in Japan are AMAZING. It is like a grand finale in the States for 60 minutes. I missed the first half of the 2 hour show, but what I saw was still awesome. My apartment looks straight out to where the fireworks are. So instead of sitting in the street. I got to watch the action from the comfort of my air conditioned living room. It was great.

Some friends even got to come over and watch the fireworks with me. This is Matt and Caroline Newkirk, who were here in Japan for a month to decide if they were going to come back here long term as missionaries. Right now their plan is to come back. And then there is Mary Bell, and Nobuyo (Japanese friend) and me.

The next day Mary and I ventured out to Arimatsu which is probably the tie-dying capital of the world. This sign says Ah-ri-ma-tsu．And it is all tie-dyed. All the little shops in the town that sold tie-dyed stuff had this sign hung up.
Here is a close up of the "Ah" part of the sign. This particular technique of tying is called Kanako shibori.

This lady is doing the Kanako shibori. Shibori means tie dying. She puts the fabric on a little metal spike and ties the string two times and then takes it off of the spike and ties it two more times. Then she moves on the next spot to be tied. Her fingers were so fast it was amazing. The ladies were so nice. They talked to us and answered our questions. And they wanted to know where we were from and what we were doing in Japan. They were very friendly. Good thing for me that Mary understood a lot of what they were saying.
This lady is doing the spider shibori. Her finished product will make squares. Notice that the clothing they are wearing is tie dyed.

She even let us cut the threads of a fabric that had already been dyed. Here is Mary a little worried that she might not be doing it right.



But she got it in the end.

We had a great time shopping the tie dying in Arimatsu is 100 times better than the tie dying I used to do at home with rubber bands.