The Star Festival: Tanabata Matsuri

The Tanabata bamboo at school

Japan loves its festivals. To be fair, there is a lot to love about festivals in Japan. It's interesting to see how the customs have evolved in different places at different paces. However, since this is the first real summer that I have spent in Japan, I am getting to enjoy some of the really wonderful summer festivals for the first time. Most recently, at the beginning of July, Hakodate celebrated the Japanese festival of Tanabata (the Star Festival), which is a little like Halloween. The whole thing is based off a legend that goes something like this.

Long ago there was a woman named Orihime who lived with her father, Tentei, near the Amano River. Orihime always wove very beautiful cloth, but she always busy. She never had time to meet anyone or fall in love. Seeing that his daughter was unhappy, her father arranged for Orihime to meet a young man named Hikoboshi, who raised cows on the other side of the Amano. The two met and instantly fell in love, and they were married not long after. However, after they were married, Orihime stopped weaving cloth, and Hikoboshi stopped tending to his cows, which became roaming all over the countryside. Tentei became angry and sent Hikoboshi back to the other side of the river, forbidding his daughter to ever see her husband again. Orihime pleaded with her father to let the pair meet, and Tentei finally allowed that the two could see one another once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month if both worked hard for the rest of the year. Yet, on the first year that they were supposed to meet, Orihime arrived at the river to find that the bridge had been washed away by the rain. She began to cry, and as she did so, her tears turned into magpies which lifted her up and carried her across the river to be with her love.

S-chan and M-san decorating

Okaa-san getting ready to
decorate

Tanabata snacks

Tanabata, which takes place in a lot of regions right around the same time as the major festival to honor deceased ancestors (which is called Obon), shares a number of traditions with other Japanese festivals, but It also has a few interesting aspects of its own. First is the custom of decorating a bamboo sprig with wishes for the coming year. I did this twice this year--once with the rest of the students at in my program, and again at home with my host family. The second of these traditions is for usually elementary school age kids, who walk around to the houses with bamboo sprigs outside the door. Ususally they are dressed up in traditional Japanese summer kimonos (called yukata). They knock on the door, and when someone answers, they sign a song so that the family will give them snacks.

The finished product

Naturally, this being a small town in rural Japan, once we started to get our first few visitors of the night, word got around pretty quickly that there were real live foreigners giving out Tanabata treats at our house. I don't know if we were the most popular house in Hakodate that night, but we were busy. S-san had to keep running up and down the stairs every few minutes to greet someone else, and usually it was to shrieks of "AAAH! GAIJIN! (FOREIGNERS!)" They were very, very excited.

こどもたちはわたしに「がいじん！」といいました。