Yosakoi Soran, Part 1

For my whole life I have been a lazy person who does not like to participate. While I was a University student I was enrolled in a T'ai Chi class, and when I was a child I was a member of a few clubs. I would tell my mother I wanted to join the club because it looked interesting, but I would only go for a short while and then drop out. This happened with gymnastics, baton twirling and Brownies. Other than that, for my whole life I have not done the 'group thing.' I did not join a single team or club during high school. I did not get involved in any community activities. Yet despite this, I have found that here in Japan things are different.

Not long after I came to Akita, the next town over hosted an international event that I attended. I saw kids from the school performing dances in a style I had never seen before. They were dressed in costumes made of bright fabrics cut in non-traditional yet still distinctly Japanese style. They were leaping about waving wooden clacker-things to music that got into my mind and made me want to dance too. I thought 'Wow, that's pretty cool,' and then promptly forgot all about it.

A week or two later, my town had its annual summer festival, the Wantou Matsuri. At the festival, I saw this type of dance being performed again. That time it was not school kids dancing, but adult women who belonged to a dancing club. I got out my Japanese dictionary (because I could not speak Japanese at that time) and said to Machiko-san who works at the BOE, "Sh . . . shi . . . shitai," (which translates as 'want to do'). Well, she managed to understand what I meant, and on Monday morning when I went to work I was told (via translation software on a computer) that they had rung the teacher of the dance club, and someone would be coming to my house on Thursday evening to take me to the club in Kisakata.

I found out that the Thursday night class is an 'all-styles' dance club, not just that Japanese-style dancing. I did not understand at that time why I was learning line dancing instead of what I wanted to learn. I did not understand the instructions at the club, and I was very unfit so it hurt a lot. Therefore each lesson seemed to last for ages and I had that feeling of 'wanting to quit' that I knew from my childhood, but I stuck with it. That was mainly because someone had been assigned to drive me to the club, and they turned up at my house every Thursday evening whether I wanted to go or not.

I gradually started to learn what was going on. The Japanese-style dancing is called Yosakoi Soran. I could not join the Yosakoi team at that time because it was the middle of the festival season. I had to wait until the next spring. But until many months later that was all I could understand with my limited Japanese.

I received my naruko (aforementioned 'clacky things') as a present from the office lady at the Elementary school at which I sometimes work.

In the October of that year, I was invited to go with the Yosakoi people to Sendai. The Kisakata team is half of a big team, the original half of the team living in Wakkanai City in Hokkaido. So in Sendai I got to meet a lot of crazy people from the very end of Japan (Wakkanai is the most northern city in all of Japan) and watch the team perform many times in a big festival. My job was to watch everyone's bags as they danced. The trip was a lot of fun, and made me even more eager to join the Yosakoi team.

I started to enjoy the Thursday classes. My Japanese was making progress, as was my fitness, so that made a big difference. Then the spring of last year arrived. It was the beginning of the Yosakoi season, and I could enroll with the team.

So I went along on the Tuesday night and started learning Yosakoi Soran dances.

(I will continue this later: I need to collect my thoughts for a bit first. For now, here are some links:
Link 1
Link 2)