Alps Kakuda Summer Festival

Last night was the “Alps” summer festival in Kakuda. Alps is one of the big manufacturing companies in Kakuda. They make electronic parts for cars. They’ve been holding festivals every year for supposedly a long time. I think most of the population of Kakuda showed up for the event.

Our friend’s kids Ken and Karin wore Yukata for the festival. In the background you can see Kakuda station. We met there before going to the festival. At the festival they had all kinds of food, dancing and events. By far the most popular was the Power Rangers!

Yes, they had to battle evil in Kakuda too. It seems space monsters appear in Kakuda, not just Tokyo. Maybe it’s because of the rocket factory. I caught some of their fierce battle in action. Check it out below.

Of course after a hard battle all rangers have to shake the hands of every child in the area. That’s like a ranger rule.

After that there was some really spectacular fireworks. It was really impressive!

Then the evening finished. I definitely want to come back next year. If you haven’t already noticed by my recent posts, August is the month for summer festivals. There’s one happening almost every couple days it seems.

Cicadas

Japan has a hell of a lot of cicadas! They’re also really big too! The one that I took a picture of above was easily five centimeters or bigger. Let’s just say I didn’t have to zoom in to take the picture. Cicadas are called “semi” over here. The noise created by these things is almost constant. During the past month you can’t go a single moment with out hearing their singing. I made a video so you could hear how noisy they are. It’s really deafening sometimes.

My mother in law caught one and also let me take a video of it’s noise close up. You can almost hear the panic in it’s voice.

Gurren Lagann

Lately I’ve been watching the animation Gurren Lagann. I haven’t really enjoyed watching any animation in a while. Mostly because I’m not interested at all in any of the new shows. Well, Gurren Lagann is the first one in a while that I’ve really liked. It’s like an old style giant robot show. Every episode they fight enemy robots and peform increasingly ridiculous special moves. It’s all very campy over the top cool and kind of nostalgic, recalling the shows that were popular when I was young. I’ve posted a clip of some of the craziness below. Enjoy!

Village Vanguard

Village Vanguard is one of my favourite store in Japan. As the sign says, it’s an “exciting book store”. Actually the books seem to be a secondary thing here. This store has the most amazing mix of different things. It has to be seen to be believed.

Everything from old style cameras to toys to cool household items and joke items. I can often spend a long time looking around at all of the interesting stuff. If you ever come to Japan, stoping by one of these stores is required. You won’t regret it.

Yanagyu Summer Festival

On Saturday with our friends Megumi and Cliff and their kids we went to the Summer festival in Yanagyu , which is where our friends Hiromi and Yoshinori live. So we met up with them and all went together. It was held in the park next to their apartment building. In the center there was a big stand with lanterns hanging from it.

There was people playing the flute and lots of people playing drums, like below.

There was all kinds of traditional dancing and people wearing costumes.

Lots of kids were wearing yukata, just like the festival at Shibata. I’m still surprised at how many wear them.

Hiromi’s sister was there as well with her kids. Hiromi’s niece looks so cute in here little yukata. I couldn’t resist posting a picture.

Close to the end they had a Bon Odori dance which everyone could take part in. They all walked and danced in a circle.

At the very end they had a prize draw. Hiromi won the grand prize! It was 10,000 yen of grocery certificates at the local grocery store. Omedeto!!

I’ve never seen Hiromi so excited before. Here’s a picture of the whole gang at the festival.

We all had a good time. Thanks Yanagyu!

Mahjong

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of mahjong. Mahjong in a really old Chinese game that is played with tiles. It’s kind of similar to the card game Gin.  It’s also really popular in Japan. You have three different suits (dots, bamboo, and numbers), three colors (white, red, and green), and four winds (north, south, east and west). You try and make sets of three like three of a kind or sequential. You also have to have one pair to finish your hand.

I picked up a set of tiles at the second hand shop in Kakuda. It was only 900 yen, which is pretty cheap, because set usually go for 5000 yen or higher. It’s really nice to play with the thick tiles. The only drawback is that it’s not very portable. The set is rather heavy and you have to use a felt mat to play or it’s really noisy. All of this stuff can be difficult to bring to someones house if you don’t have a car. To remedy this I bought a card set of mahjong.

It’s really cheap and very light, which makes it easy to carry around. It’s also a lot easier to set up too. We played it at the park on a picnic table the other day while the kids were playing.

The cards are a little bit smaller than normal playing cards. I also like to play mahjong on my DS. I play the game “Mahjong Fight Club”. It’s really fast paced and fun.

The only bad thing is it only has Japanese rules, which are more difficult than Chinese rules. Usually I play Chinese rules, but I’m learning the Japanese rules. You can see a screen shot below.

I’m ranked at the 1th skill level in the game, which is pretty good. It’s the highest skill level ranking for the game. I often play this on my one hour train ride to work to pass the time. I’m totally crazy for mahjong!

Korg DS-10

This new software came out this week in Japan for the Nintendo DS. It’s a Korg synthesizer for the DS. It’s not a game at all, but a real music creation program. You can do all kinds of synth manipulation, sequencing and drum patterns. Plus it’s all in English. I’ve been fooling around with it all week, making loops and songs. It’s only available in Japan right now, but it has been annouced to come out in North America sometime soon. Somebody on Youtube already made a version of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Video below.

Pizza-La

This is Pizza-La, one of the few places in Japan to get North American style pizza. The other one is Pizza Hut. Most pizza in Japan is like European pizza. Thin crust and not much cheese. Pizza-La however has lots of cheese, sauce and is oily like western pizza. This is a good thing, as after eating lots of Euro style pizza, you start to crave pizza like back home. They still have all of the crazy toppings like tuna, corn, potato, and mayo like all Japanese pizza places, but it’s twenty times more delicious! Oh, I’m craving it right now.

English…What’s?

I went and bought some food at Mini Stop for lunch the other day. Mini Stop is a popular convenience store over here. They are famous for their soft ice cream and spicy chicken. What was interesting was written on the side of their bags.

Fast Food…What’s? I have no idea what they are trying to get across, but I do know that no English people had a hand in it. You can see a bigger version below. I wonder what floral food is?

The Rocket!

Here’s a picture of the most famous landmark in Kakuda, the Kakuda rocket. As I stated in a post a long time ago, Kakuda is the city where all of the rockets are made for the Japanese space program. In tribute to this they built kind of a museum and a large rocket in one of the local parks. It’s a pretty impressive sight. You can see it from far away, and it’s one of the two tallest structures in Kakuda. Most buildings aren’t taller than three floors here.