Kawagoe Multicultural Festival

Kawagoe Multicultural Festival

This last weekend I attended a festival in Kawagoe with the members of the Hippo family club from that area. Together we marched in a parade and performed several songs that we had been practicing, one from Korea and one from Mexico.  I played guitar along with a few other members and everyone sang. It was fun!

The Kawagoe Hippo club

At the festival there were lots of different groups performing and people dressed in different traditional costumes from around the world. For the parade, my Hippo fellow asked me to wear a traditional American costume, which is hard because the U.S. doesn't really have it's own national traditional dress like a lot of other countries do. What's the U.S. equivalent of a kimono? The thing about the U.S. is it's big and comprised of people from a lot of different cultures and it doesn't have a very long history as a country comparatively. So when people ask me what traditional American dress looks like, or what a typical American meal looks like, it's sometimes hard to say, because it depends on where in the U.S. you are and who you are and the specific culture of the community or family that that you were raised in. In Mexico a lot of people even told me that I looked really American (meaning blonde hair, blue eyes) which was strange because there really is no such thing as a typical 'American looking' person, but it's interesting to see the image of the U.S. in the eyes of those from other parts of the world.

Since I didn't bring much to Japan in the way of an American costume, unless you count blue jeans, the fellow from the Kawagoe Hippo club lent me a cowboy hat that she bought in Oregon and my host mom lent me her western-style boots. I suppose the cowboy is a pretty iconic American image, and America is good at being iconic; I'll have to keep working on improving my costume for next time.

My best attempt at looking 'American'. What do you think?

I had a chance to talk with a lot of interesting people at the festival, and my travel guitar was a great point of conversation. This man was singing a song for me in  Japanese set to the tune of "Amazing Grace".