And We Danced!

Waiting before the festival Sunday on my already blistered feet had me a little worried—despite another energy drink I was lagging. Would adrenaline kick in once we had an audience? I hoped so (it is amazing how pain disappears when people are taking pictures, I found). Ako, a very sweet fellow dancer, taught me how to say, “My feet hurt!” in Japanese. We got a lot of mileage out of this over the course of the evening. Many Americans commented, “Ooo, I bet you’ve learned a lot of Japanese in dance practice!” Yes! I’ve learned how to say, “No, not like that,” and “One more time!” and “This hurts!” and “Everyone smile!” At night I dream of taiko drum beats, the rhythmic clapping of our instructors, long strings of unintelligible Japanese dance instructions, and twirling. After discussing foot and leg pain, we joked about smiling. The Japanese girls tease me by turning to me and saying, “Smile! Smile!” because one day at practice we were admonished to smile more, so I did—thinking the whole time about last year’s parade and how I couldn’t stop smiling (also true this year!)—and I kept smiling at everyone until someone said, “Hee hee, smile like Mari-chan! She has number one smile!” Waiting to go into our first performance Sunday we practiced the biggest, then the weirdest smiles we could manage. I told them I am very careful to smile during performances in case I miss a step; that way I’ll be That Smiling American, not That Sloppy American. Ako laughed at this and said, “I feel tired, but when I see you smiling, I feel happy, not tired.” This gave me another reason to keep smiling. Half the friends I saw didn’t recognize me until I waved to them. Even in the pictures, I can’t quite tell which one is me! One of the nicest compliments anyone has given me here was a sweet Japanese woman who said she enjoys reading my blog because she thinks I have a Japanese heart. That made me smile for days. As I twirled and smiled and spun my fan overhead Saturday night I thought to myself, “I really do have a Japanese heart!” Then, ironing for hours Sunday morning I grumbled to myself, “Nope, still American.” But today I cleaned my whole Japanese house for hours, so maybe I can try for the best of both. Sunday night we danced through the heart of Yamato Station straight away. Smokey clouds billowed off yakitori grills, filling the streets with the savory smell of roasted chicken. A vendor toted a box of cucumbers on sticks. Everyone had huge cups of shaved ice. Children and adults were tied into beautiful yukata with neatly bowed obi. Lanterns lined the streets; the crowds clapped in time with the drums. I noticed the same people from performance to performance, so some people were following us along. A lot of the other dance groups featured kids or consisted solely of lyrical arm-waving. We did the lyrical arm-waving, but we also did a kite dance (yakko dance), lots of spins, jumps and a fan-wave with fancy festival fans imported from Tokushima Prefecture (Ebisu dance) and some back-and-forth ‘dance off’ spinning (Shin dance) before a final crescendo finish! The fan-wave got a lot of “OOOoooooo!”s from the crowd. Despite the pain in my feet, I thought, “I never could have imagined dancing in a foreign country’s summer festival like this! This might be the pinnacle of the Japan Tour!!” What fun to dance through streets crackling with excitement! What a privilege!!The rosy glow of the sunset was soon obscured by black thunderclouds; the drums boomed, lightening streaked across the sky, and the first drops of rain fell as we spun and dipped in the hot summer streets. An orange full moon hung between gaps of cloud, the rain fell and we danced.