Tsukuba Matsuri

Last weekend was the annual Tsukuba Matsuri (festival).  This is not to be confused with the Tsukuba Matsuri that I mistakenly thought was on last month, and looked like being a very lonely, one man sort of festival until someone pointed out my mistake.  This was the real thing.

Although the photo above, doesn’t really show it, it is made up of parades on the street level and approximately 1 kilometre of stalls selling food, gimmicks and experiences to Tsukuba.  Since I understand that Tsukuba has the highest foreign population percentage of any Japanese city it is not surprising that there were stalls from Mongolia, Lebanon, India, and even little old Australia.  But by far the most popular stalls on the day were solely focused on one type of Japanese festival food or another.  I have decided to make each of these dishes a focus in a series of posts just to give you a taste of real Japanese festival Junk-food.  Almost all of the food has something authentically Japanese about it, hardly any of it could be called healthy or balanced eating, and all of it is designed to be eaten out of hand while you are walking along, which in any other context would be frowned on in Japan.  But for the sake of the Matsuri, this unspoken rule of etiquette is thrown out the window and eating on the move is considered perfectly normal.

My favourite sights beside the actual parade (particular the taiko drumming) were a pair of street performers, playing Shamisens in rock star mode.  They had a rhythm backing tape and a really cool attitude, and after a very rock and roll warm up, they dropped the normal shamisen comb-things and began to play with anything they could lay their hands on from a kitchen knife and a spatula to a tri-square and a large plastic doll.  Why?  I do not know except to say that it made my day to see traditional Japanese music being blended with modern cool and comedy.  That is what I love about Japan.  Somehow the country is able to stay positively and conservatively chained to tradition while still jumping headfirst into progress.  It doesn’t make sense most of the time but it seems to work.  But enough of my backyard anthropology, I am off to select the first for the series on Japanese Festival food.