Sapporo Autumn Festival 2011

Well! It looks like google are upping their 'blog' game and, in addition to google-izing the blogger interface they've finally got around to an iPhone app! So, consider this an on the road test post. Blogging from the palm of my hand. Already I am skeptical.

Sapporo Autumn Fest is actually a lot of people's favourite festival in Sapporo it turns out. In the winter the central stretch of Odori Park is turned into the Snow Festival, and in the summer it turns into an endless sea of drunk people for Beer Garden. I love them both, but not everyone does, and it seems a bunch of people I've spoken too much prefer the relatively young Autumn Festival, which is all about food.

Sapporo Autumn Festival has been held every Autumn since 2008, and yes, the had "since 2008" written on the poster in 2008. That's just how they roll here. It's been getting bigger every year, and that's good for the variety of food on offer, but bad if you don't like crowds, or spending a long time waiting to buy food from a stall.

Oh, by the way, this year's Autumn Fest us still going on - but only until tomorrow, October 2nd. So you have a chance to check it out... but not much of a chance.

This years Autumn Fest takes up five blocks, each one having a different theme. There's a welcome area, a block for ramen and new food from all over Hokkaido, a block for restaurants from Sapporo itself to have stalls, one for wine and... classier things, and probably the best one - other food from all around Hokkaido. The new food area has been rotating dishes and I think the food there is part of a competition, but it's expensive and has an annoying ticket-based system. The other area for local Hokkaido foods is more of a farmers' market affair and I had good food from there without having to queue much at all.

Hokkaido is famous for good food, Hokkaido people are proud of their produce and it's really a no brainer to have a food festival right in the middle of town. It's well worth checking out - uh, if not this year then next!

I think this app thing is just going to dump all my photos down at the bottom in a jumble, so I'll just tell you what I ate and you can work out for yourself what's what, ok? I had amazing buta-don (pork rice bowl) from Obihiro, which is apparently famous for the stuff. I had a menchi-katsu (minced meat cutlet) burger from Eniwa that was pretty good, and an amazing jumbo scallop burger (pictured both pre and post bite) that kind of blew my mind. There's also a deer-cutlet curry there that came with a free carrot! Other things I tried that aren't pictured included potato and crab balls, sausages, sea-urchin rice and sea food curry.

I went quite a lot.

So, another great festival in Sapporo and yet more great food. Can't say fairer than that.

Sapporo Rainbow March 2009

It was fun as always! This was my third Rainbow March (Pride by any other name) and it was fun to watch the drag queens heckling builders through the PA systems.





It wasn't as sunny this year as it was the last two years, but the colours still "popped". And I played my part in ensuring there were plenty of colours to see, as you can imagine.

Odori Street Performance Festival Thing

This Wednesday post was beamed back in time from the day after.

I honestly can't remember what this thing is called, but I stumbled upon it for, like, the third year in a row last week. They close all the streets and put on tons of different performances - from rock bands, to hula dancing, to shamisen warriors, to acrobats to who knows what.





This year it looked bigger and better organised actually, so maybe it's taking off. I like it most because of the fact that the streets in Odori are suddenly pedestrianised, and the whole area feels completely different. It feels wonderful in fact, really relaxing and open, and it makes you actually look at the trees. Odori has some really nice trees y'know.

Magical Camp 2009!

Magical Camp, a small one night festival on the side of a mountain, was really fun! For one thing it's on the side of a mountain so you get views like this:


On the other hand, it's on the side of a mountain, and the campsite is on a ski slope so almost all of the tents are pitched on a crazy incline. But on the third, mutant, hand it's only for one night and the music is non stop from four different stages - so I reckon most people don't even bother going to sleep. I only used my tent as somewhere to dump stuff although Olivia took a nap in it late on. The whole thing takes place in the Teine Highland ski area, and it just looked spectacular. That's the Ishikari bay and the sea of Japan you can see up there, and at night we got the sparkling lights of North Sapporo and Ishikari to look at.

The organisation was bizarrely slap-dash in some ways. For example the first shuttle bus to the site didn't actually get there until after the first act had started, which is just odd, and there were still people setting up lots of things throughout the site until well into the day. But none of that really mattered because the whole thing had a very laid back atmosphere, and, with no artists that I desperately wanted to see, I could really enjoy the whole thing. Of course, dragging my sorry carcass home after much dancing, drinking and no sleep was no fun, but I'd certainly extracted the appropriate amount of enjoyment from the event before then. Also, last time I went to Teine Highland I broke a rib, so this was way better than that.


That's a guy with a giant brush doing an insanely intense kanji writing performance. It was awesome, and afterwards his kanji banners were hung near the main stage. There was a lot of fun stuff going on that wasn't music, and since there were less famous bands and the site was infinitely smaller than Rising Sun it came across as a lot more interesting for me. There was a precarious looking skate ramp, a kind of giant-bicycle-music-box that was pretty fun, a "Living Library" where they had interesting people giving talks to anyone who wanted to listen. And what's more the festival was centred around the ski-lodge so you could use nice indoor toilets and they could set up rooms like this:


Musically, the artists were less famous and more dance oriented - there were a lot of DJs, and... to be honest the kind of music you might describe as "festival fare". However I still saw a bunch of great stuff and because I wasn't expecting much, it was a nice surprise. Katsuhiko played and was awesome, as were Shonen Knife, and the British group Pest, who I'd never heard of but they're on Ninja Tunes and were really fucking good. It was utterly surreal to see a British band playing at a Japanese festival though. I saw a little bit of a couple of small Japanese bands that I liked too - Aoizera Kyoushitsu and... another one that I'll have to look up... so it was cool to find good new music.


If the fates allow, I certainly check it out next year. It was fun, and fairly relaxing although it did get pretty damn cold because you're near the top of a fucking mountain. Still, I love fucking mountains so I could live with that happily enough.

Hanabi at the Toyohira River

For the last two years I've been working when Sapporo's fireworks festivals took place. They're always on Friday nights in the summer, so I couldn't attend. I could however watch, even from where I worked in the Northern reaches of the city, as a zillion people, many wearing yukatas, were sucked inexorably to the area.

This year, I finished work just at the right time to go see them light up the sky:


While everyone told me how crowded it was before, I was still taken aback. Thousands of people packed the area around the river, trying to find a comfortable vantage point. We ended up smack behind a bridge coz we couldn't bother to look very hard for somewhere to sit, but we could see all the good, big ones perfectly from there.


I would imagine that this was one of the busiest nights for almost every restaurant and bar in the city, as it was a balmy evening and after the fifty minute show was over people just streamed into the streets: looking for food, shelter and education. Or possibly just food and liquor, I didn't stop to ask - we were too busy trying to get something to eat. We had to push our bikes like six blocks coz the streets were too packed to cycle.


The show was good, but not the biggest or the best fireworks show in the world I'm sure. I saw some shapes - they had different kinds of fruit and what I guess was a cat, or a pig. Or a cat and a pig. Actually the logistics of launching a firework that can explode in a certain shape in the sky elude me. How can you even do that - get everything to spin off in the right direction? Science beyond the means of mere mortal men, that's how.


Are Japanese people famous for loving fireworks? Do they have a special bond with fireworks? I'm not sure. Japanese fireworks shows tend to be bigger and louder than the ones I saw in England, but maybe I just saw half-arsed ones in England. Also the volume and size doesn't necessarily make them better. It's nice to feel your chest kicked by the shockwaves from some massive rocket every now and then, but variation is a virtue too.

Anyway the Toyohira Fireworks were a lot of fun. And being able to go made me very happy.

Happy Father's Day Stephen!

I'm not being all that straight, I already sent this picture to my pa as an online Father's Day card. I snapped it in the window of United Arrows in Parco:


You can laugh, but I think they've really hit on something here. Even in Japan, the land of the beardless, a beard is still an integral part of the Father's role in their child's development. How many infants' growth have been stunted by a clean-shaven pater? Think on't recent fathers and fathers-to-be, do not deny your child the joy of a bearded dad.

Yosakoi Soran 2009

Yosakoi Soran Carnival is huge. I mean, I had no idea how big - last year I was too busy to see any of it and I was kind of pissed off because people kept saying how it was everywhere, and they couldn't get away from it. Well this year, it was everywhere for me too. Yuki said that someone claimed more people come to see Yosakoi now than come to see the Snow Festival in Sapporo, and I find that pretty hard to believe, since due to the rain, most places seemed fairly sparsely attended. However I can easily believe that more people come to dance in the festival than come to Snow Festival because there were Yosakoi dancers bloody everywhere. And since they've all got to appear at different locations all over the city on some meticulously planned schedule they were always running around in huge groups, like crack teams of extras from Steven Spielberg's Hook.

Oh yeah, I should explain. Yosakoi is a massive kind of contemporary Japanese team dance contest. It's less than twenty years old, and started like the Snow Festival, when a student from Hokkaido University... um... felt like having a team dance thing? Things snowballed and lo and behold 18 years later Tara can sit in Odori Park while separate performances (each with their own deafening sound system) go on in front of her, behind her, and in the streets either side of her.

We saw the Yosakoi Illusion Parade which was a big kind of doss for all the different teams to get together and march in one long line. It was kind of fun, but not all that special as regards... um choreography.

After that we squeezed ourselves behind a tree to get a look at the actual competition stage; I think we were watching the semi-final.

Yosakoi is kind of Japanese dance, but with lots of contemporary elements. The only requirements are that you have the little hand shaker things, and that your music incorporates elements of Soran - Hokkaido fishermen's songs. That literally just means shouting "SORAN" every now and then. Every team has someone on the mic to either sing, or mostly just shout things like "Here we go!" and "Ha!" The college team pictured above had a girl with a voice like cheese-wire - it was painful. Another team featured a phenomenal singer, and two MCs who were wasted on the lumpen dancers.

On Sunday we went over to Olivia's place because one of the MANY parades goes right past her window.

It was pissing it down, so turnout was minimal, but the dancers still gave it a hundred and twenty percent. I especially liked the teams who featured a burly flag bearer at the rear:


The winners this year were Hiragishi Tenjin, from Sapporo. They're one of the two best teams who dominate the competition every year (or so I'm told, I also found a video of them dancing in Thailand to launch the first Bangkok Yosakoi Soran, and I think I heard the core team work as backing dancers for J-Pop people sometimes). While a lot of teams are doing it for fun, you've gotta audition to get into the big teams and they have corporate sponsorship to put on a great show and hire professional choreographers. And, as might be expected, they're head and shoulders above everyone else. Here's the final ceremony and their performance:

Yeah, that's pretty good. Both years I've been in Sapporo now though, Yosakoi's been a really wet event - lots of rain. Let's hope it's a sunny spell next year.

Hokkaido University Festival 2009

Hanami in Maruyama Kouen

The whole of Maruyama Park smelt like it was on fire, there were that many barbecues. That's the real meaning of Hanami (cherry blossom viewing) parties. Or maybe it's getting hammered in the trees. Or possibly looking at flowers with your colleagues... I'm not 100% sure.


The cherry blossoms have come and gone everywhere else in Japan, but here in Hokkaido we're always fashionably late. Or fashionably early when it comes to Winter. One or the other, rarely on time, that's for sure. So, perfectly timed for the big public holiday week of Golden Week the flowers arrive in Sapporo and everyone can go get drunk in the park and play badminton and space out and look at flowers:


They're very pretty. We also walked to Hokkaido Shrine, which was surrounded with festival food stands where we bought potato snacks and Bunny got a blue banana on a stick. Here's the path leading up to the shrine:


The Shrine was all decked out in preparation for May 5th celebrations, with huge great carp banners:


May 5th is Children's Day (sometimes Boys' Day) and there'll be a big celebration for that too. I'm not sure what the relevance of the carp is, I should probably look that up. Today - more park action, upon which I will report anon.

Sapporo Short Fest 2008

Annual events man, that's where it's at. Screw all this bi-annual, tri monthly, quad-weekly business; this weekend I ain't touching it unless it's got a 2008 on the end. Since this left me somewhat limited in my choice of activities, I decided to go to the Sapporo Short Film Festival.


The festival is split into many, many hour-and-a-half slots across six days, with the shorts split into vaguely thematic groups. Each selection is repeated a few times, and this year I managed to see three of the sets: Portraits, Imagination and the UK national selection (repreeeezentin'). It mostly takes place in the Toho Plaza cinema which is a great place, and it is staffed by super-nice, super-enthusiastic volunteers who are incredibly eager to welcome you and give you a copy of the festival programme and a voting slip and a questionnaire and... oh do you have a copy of the festival programme yet? Oh you do, and a voting slip and... oh you have that too.


I'm a goddamned liberal, white, middle-class fella so I could just eat this shit up all day. Still I reckon it was a pretty great affair all around, even though it started pretty rough as far as the films go (sheesh, that Thai transexual story...). By the end of the first selection we'd seen the eventual winner (a fantastic tragic love story called On The Line, directed by Reto Caffi, which it would appear is cleaning up this year) and we got to see last year's winning movie too as part of the UK selection. I didn't really do much digging to find this out, we ran into Motoi, who I know and who works for the film festival on the last day and he pointed all the winners and interesting ones out. Thanks Motoi (there's a picture of him down there pointing them out to Tara)! Some of the directors were there too, and they popped on stage before the screenings to say a few words about their films (through a translator), and there were plenty of talks and interviews that you could attend if you were so inclined.


Some movies suffered from the shoe-string budget on which they were clearly shot. I would imagine that so many short films are shot digitally now - it must be a way cheaper way of doing things, and it must encourage so many people to just try their hands at making films. But when it's was blown up on the cinema screen the digital grain can't help but detract a little from the movies' effect. Still the genius ones shone through. I really liked Not Available Today by Gustavo Taretto, which was quirky and romantic in a good way; and the gay Icelandic wrestling movie Wrestling by Grimur Hakonarson, which was just really good.


The movies that stood out, the really good ones were the ones that didn't feel like short films. I don't know if that sounds like a stupid, trite or obvious thing to say, but it's the best way I can think of to describe what elevated some of the movies above the others. So many short films rely on hideously melodramatic music to give the story the gravitas that it doesn't have time to gather naturally. A couple of otherwise good films were spoiled for me when the denouement was followed by a beautifully timed, poignant plink... plink... on the piano. And I'm coming to dread reading "surprise ending!" on the synopsis, because the surprise ending is invariably the most glaringly obvious thing a chicken with a metal plate in its head could have thought of.

Still the best ones really were excellent, in that they could do in 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes what some directors can't do in a two hour movie - tell a story well.