Waseda Festival

Unfortunately, after the retreat in Karuizama, in which 34 students slept in close quarters and stayed up late for several nights with a significant disregard for health, I fell down with a bit of a cold this week. At this point I'm essentially past it, although I still maintain the cough that I always have after being sick, but the general level of health is pretty good. 元気だよ。The week was fairly mundane, but excitement came with the weekend.

This weekend's big event was 早稲田祭, which basically translated to Waseda Festival. Around this time of the year, the majority of universities have some sort of festival. As far as I can tell this is something that doesn't happen in the US. Universities might have festivals for some reason or another, but these festivals are just basically a celebration of the universities, no other reason required. However, these aren't university-only affairs. Being that Waseda is one of the most prestigious universities in Japan, it's festival draws a crowd of roughly 100,000 people every year and has all of the necessary staples: A performance or two by famous individuals, several stages of performances happening all day, tons of food stands and a special brand of density that can only be found at big festivals.

The festival before it got particularly crowded

Among the many performance at the festival was the juggling group that I have joined. While I am definitely not a performance level (compared to the rest of the group here), I still was with the group for a good portion of the weekend. All day Friday was spent helping them "setup" for Saturday's performances. This basically involved 7 hours of juggling, with maybe 2 hours of actual setup-related work being done, but it was a good way to spend a free Friday. Our group basically had an off-the-main-path performance space completely to ourselves for the entire day, and the range of performances throughout the day Saturday drew quite the crowd. After I had my fill of other festivities at the festival, I came back and helped draw people in to come see is. It was actually really fun, especially since everybody passing by seemed pretty surprised that I knew the necessary Japanese to say "Come watch us juggle!".

The following day (Sunday), there was not setup necessary: the group had a spot on one of the central stages for an hour. I watched the show with the other non-performing members of the group, and it was tremendously well done and fun. I'm definitely stealing many of the ideas I've seen in the juggling group and bringing them back to the circus back at K. That night the group essentially rented out a bar and had a party to celebrate the end of the festival, which is the last big event for the year (even though the academic year doesn't end until the beginning of February). That party was fun for many reasons, the main of which was that the Japanese students were definitely more talkative and willing to interact with me and the other international student after a couple drinks.

One of the routines performed on center stage. Note (and be appropriately amazed): 3 people, 9 diabolos. 

To me, that's one of the greatest things about shows and their subsequent celebrations: the tendency to bring everyone involved together. It's one of the reasons that I'm involved with performing groups back at K, and I'm glad to see that it transfers across cultural borders. Needless to mention that while I definitely did not have a relaxing weekend, it was definitely an enjoyable one.