A small crowd managed to brave the rain this weekend to celebrate the Japanese Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens.
“Konnichi wa!” A woman greeted the few dozen soaked spectators in front of the Cohen Amphitheater in the garden. “Come on, there’s like no one here. You’re going to have to yell louder than that!”
The Japanese Festival is an annual three day celebration of Japanese culture. It started on Saturday morning with a ceremony including music and kagamiwari, the ritual breaking open of a barrel of sake.
A variety of other events were packed into a busy weekend, such as a kimono fashion show and taiko, which is Japanese drumming. A handful of events, unfortunately, had to be canceled due to rain, such as the martial arts demonstrations. Others, such as the bon odori dance, were moved inside.
Still, vendors of Japanese food, jewelry, and souvenirs lined the garden. The Missouri Botanical Garden is home to Seiwa-en, the largest Japanese strolling garden in North America. Seiwa-en features dry gravel landscaping, rock gardens, a lake, and traditional buildings. The lake is home to Teahouse Island, where hourly tours were held throughout the festival. The garden was dedicated in 1977, the year of the first Japanese Festival.
At the sumo wrestling demonstration, the crowd warmed up to the three wrestlers, cheering them on as they showed fighting moves, stretches, and ancient rituals.
The three Sumo wrestlers, Koryu, Sunahama and Kamikiiwa, are American athletes who moved to Japan to study the country’s national sport and now live in Hawaii. They explain that Sumo wrestling is much more than a sport in Japanese culture. It is a highly respected lifestyle that originated as a religious performance to the Shinto gods. Many ancient rituals are practiced today, such as the leg stomps demonstrated by the Sumo wrestlers. This is a warm up ritual to stamp out the evil spirits in their feet.
The wrestlers invited audience members to join them onstage and taught them leg stomps and other warm ups. One audience member began a match with one of the wrestlers, but the rain began to fall and cut the demonstration short.
At another event, which was happily inside, anthropologist Liza Dalby gave a presentation on her own experience with Japanese culture entitled “From Geisha to Gardener.”
After Dalby received a letter from one of her father’s acquaintances in Japan inviting her to visit the country and stay with a family there, she spent the year following her high school graduation abroad. Ever since then, she has been travelling between the U.S. and Japan, delving into the cultural differences and writing books on her thoughts and findings.
Dalby’s first book, “Geisha,” investigates the geisha culture that she became involved in after she falling in love with the traditional geisha instrument, the shamisen. Dalby has also written books on kimono and the classic Japanese novel “The Tale of Genji.”
The Missouri Botanical Garden is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily and costs $8.
