Memories

Meme time!

Most of my childhood summers were spent with relatives in Japan. It was always interesting as my cousin was a year younger than me, so it was always like we had an extra brother for 2 months out of the year. My grandparents and aunt and uncle would take us to all sorts of cool places, and we spent much of our time building plastic Gundam models, playing Famicom games, reading manga, and biking to the nearby parks and recreation centers.

But the highlight of every trip? The Obon Festival. It's a festival that takes place in japan in August, and it is celebrated with an outdoor bazaar of sorts, lined with games, food carts, and general mayhem. In the center, there was always a large tower with a man in a loin cloth banging away on a large taiko drum. Around the base of the tower, people dressed in yukatas (sort of like casual kimonos) would do traditional folk dances in a circle around it.

My aunt would give us each a small amount of money to spend that evening. My cousin and I would sit there and plot how we would maximize the fun-value of our money, examine all the booths, and make sure we had enough money to go to the "kingyo sukui" (translated: "goldfish saving") booth at the end of the evening. I'll get back to that later.

My brother, on the other hand, would almost always blow his entire purse on a single item (BB gun, massive amounts of food, or whatever). And, of course, he'd usually come around to see if he could bum money off of me or my cousin, but we usually stood strong.

We'd head to the toy carts where you they had a bundle of ropes all mixed up, then run through a mesh, and on the other end, each rope is attached to a dangling toy. You would pay money and then pull a rope... whatever toy raised was the one you got. It was always a thrill, trying to figure out what rope connected to what, or simply not knowing what you'd get...

Or there were the bizarre rice cracker booths. You could pay money to eat a plain rice cracker (really good ones, though), or you could pay to spin THE WHEEL OF DOOM!!! Essentially, it was a bonus thing you could do to have a random condiment added to your cracker... and some of them were fairly bizarre. They had chocolate, spices, etc. Fun.

And, of course, the kingyo sukui. You are given a little magnifying glass-shaped scooper with thin paper where the glass should be. You have to use that to scoop as many goldfish out of a giant tub as you can. Of course, the scooper being made of paper makes it fairly difficult... but if you're good, you can get quite a few. In addition to goldfish, there were also tadpoles. Most kids kept the goldfish, but I always traded mine for tadpoles. Simply because I knew I'd only be in Japan for so long, and by the time it was time to leave, they would grow legs and jump out of the little bowl we would keep them in in the backyard...

Simply a great time on a hot summer night with friends and family... I miss those festivals.