August 14th - Awa Odori Dance Festival - Culture

It was 10:00 at night we had just arrived in Tokushima and took a cab from the Awa Odori Airport to our hotel, we were all exhausted. Kush and Zuhare were sleeping, Chase was quite drowsy, and Mohir, as usual, was busy watching YouTube. We were all quite excited about our next day in Japan, the day almost all of us, especially me were waiting diligently for, attending the world renown Japanese Awa Odori Festival. We slept as soon as we stepped foot into our hotel room which as any other hotel in Japan was utmost comforting and relaxing, almost everyone other than Mohir slept at the same time, we all wanted to wake up early so that we could get up early have a good breakfast and leave for the festival which normally isn't that crowded in the mornings as the main events are always held during the evening from 6 all the way to midnight. We all woke up at 6 o clock in the morning, Zuhare like always didn't have a shower as he likes to have them at night, while Chase took nearly 30 mins in the bathroom, even Mohir who slept way later than us took only 10 mins to take a shower. Kush also had a shower at night so he didn't feel like taking it in the morning. As soon as we got out of the hotel, we all asked Kush to find a good restaurant that all of us could eat in. He found an Indian Restaurant in Minamishowacho which was like a downtown suburb or county of Tokushima. The food was great, and it felt really good to eat another countries food in Japan.


While throughout the day many small dance events took place, we were preparing more for the big event that would take place at 6:00 and were starting to learn more about what we were going to be getting tonight. We learned through some research that the festival basically in English translates to a fools dance, as according to the legend and facts, in 1587 when the Feudal lord Hachisuka Lamesa in celebration of his newly built Tokushima palace, offered sake a Japanese rice wine to all his people, and his citizens got so drunk at night that started dancing in an unregular and unsteady gait. So we figured out that this dance isn't some practiced dance that took months in preparation, but an every day drunk dance that the Japanese people and over 1.6 million tourists have celebrated yearly. Once the clock hit 6 in Tokushima, the entire city became a massive dance battleground as the city got divided into 6 different stages that were showing both the free dances and the paid dances. For the most part we weren't very worried about our seats, as we had booked our seats for the paid dances nearly a month ago, but we were in a hurry to get good seats for the free performances that took place at 6, because as a lot of Japanese citizens told us that if we didn't arrive at least 1 hr or 2 before the performance started then you wouldn't have any good seats or even any seats left, especially if you're here with 5 of your friends. So we did arrive at 5 and even then we had to look at least 2 rounds before we could find 5 seats for all of us.


The time during dance was honestly both one of the frustrated and exciting parts of the day, as you couldn't even hear or see the folk song and dance clearly, because of the fact that we had to stand up through the nearly ecstatic and exuberant crowd that wouldn't stop cheering and clapping for at least 2 to 3 hrs, but at the same time the dresses and the unique yet common method of dancing that the locals had managed so well made even the free dances completely worth the watch. Once the dance ended, we were really tired and wanted to do something else that didn't involve dance, so we started to go on the lookout for the food and game stalls present in the festival. We could spend enough time playing in the game stalls because our next show would not start until about half an hour later, so we had time to play some of the card and arcade games present during the half time break we had. Once our break time was about to get over, we started to rush towards our paid performance which was about to start in a moment.


The Paid dance that takes place at 10:30 at night was the one we were all looking forward to, all that tension, discipline, and trouble we went through all that day was completely worth it for this performance and the others that took place that night, it was almost jaw dropping as you could literally see Japan's rich culture and history right before your eyes through these simple yet memorable performances of all sorts of demographics in the population, the old, young, middle-aged and the woman. The preparation and dedication that the dance members had to go through was clearly evident by how much me, chase, zuhare and mohir enjoyed it, You would have to see it in order to believe how these absolutely stunning performances have made Awa Odori become one of the most visited festivals in the entire world.

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