Kaso Bon-Odori (Costume competition O-Bon-dance) 札幌仮装盆踊り2015年

Me

Every year there is a Bon-Odori dance in Sapporo from August 14 to 20, every evening in the big Odori Koen park in central Sapporo. People show up and dance the traditional Hokkai-Bon-Odori, which has a few simple moves repeated over and over and over for three hours. You can join and leave whenever you want, and everyone dances in a circle around a tower where people are playing the same song over and over and over on drums and flutes.

Judges booth. You have to dance past this place all alone, with almost no music.

The last day of the Bon-Odori there is a costume competition. This is apparently a Hokkaido only thing, and people in the south do not have this custom, though O-Bon and Bon-Odori is celebrated all over Japan. I participated last year, as a ghost (O-Bon is the time when the spirits of the ancestors come visiting, like Halloween, so ghost would be appropriate).

The woman in white came too late to register (you have to do the registration 2 hours before the event starts) and was not allowed to participate.

This year I went as the kuchisake onna (the slit mouthed woman). I had lots of fun, and met some people who also participated last year. For the competition, you have to register in advance, and you get a big number to stick to both front and back. Then you dance all alone (one team at a time) in front of the judges. After passing the judges you join the main Bon-Odori circle and dance for one more hour or so together with people not in costume. Then there is an award ceremony where the winners get nice prizes. When this finishes, they tear down the Bon-Odori musician tower and remove all traces of the celebration from the park.

This guy asked me if I know who he was supposed to be, and seemed happy that I knew of the TV show "Arrow".

I have never won anything at the costume competition (though you do get one PET bottle of tea and a tissue box as a "participation prize") but I have always been very popular with the people that come to watch. Hundreds of people have asked me if they can take photos of me or together with me, and many more just snap photos without asking. Last year I was apparently even on TV, while waiting for a green light on my way to the park, haha.

My personal favorite was this woman dressed as yakisoba bento, a fast food dish.

The people I find impressive at the competition also almost never get any prizes, so apparently my view and the judges do not agree on what the competition is about, haha. I have fairly recently got to know a girl who lives in my neighborhood, and she said that her father has lots of photos of me. For instance from the Bon-Odori last year. She also sometimes mentions things like "My father saw you at Seven-11 last week" etc. I have no idea who her father is, though.

This year, she found me at the Bon-Odori and dragged her parents along with her and introduced us. So now I finally know what her father looks like, haha. He had already taken photos of me this year too.

This guy was very popular with the camera wielding crowd.

When you register for the competition you have to write down things like where you are from, the average age of the team members, anything you had problems with or something you want to brag about in your costume. I wrote down that it was very difficult to get the yukata for women on, because of size problems and because the ways women and men wear yukatas are apparently completely different. The announcer who was commentating all the teams when you passed in front of the judges (and a few hundred people looking from the sides) said that from his point, I seemed to have got the girly look down pretty much perfectly.

These women were very nice. And they won the competition.

My friend's mother also said that my dancing style was very girly too. I guess it was a compliment, but since I just danced the way I always do, this means that I normally dance like a girl even when dressed like myself... Which is probably not that great. But I learned Bon-Odori by looking at the other people dancing and just mimicking them, so since most of the participants that seemed to know what they were doing were women, I guess that just stuck.

I did not win any prize this year either, but I had lots of fun. Now I just have to figure out something clever for next year. If I manage to extend my visa.

I took a photo together with these two last year, and the remembered/recognized me

I loved the sumo wrestler ladies

A whole team of Where's Wallys

These people wanted to take a photo with me while we were dancing, and they found me again while waiting for the announcements of the winners.

The winners in the "individual" (one or two member teams) category. The left couple were 80-something years old and 90-something years old!

Teams getting various special prizes

Teams getting various special prizes

Second place in the "child" category

Winner of the "child" category

Fifth place

Fourth place

Third place

Second place (dressed as traditional Japanese brides in kimonos)

First place, "Cats"

Two friends from last year that said: "Let's meet again next year"

Me and my consolation/participation prizes

Becoming the slit mouthed woman again

Last year I became the "kuchisake onna" (slit mouthed woman) for Halloween. I was not entirely happy with the result, but it was quite fun. I decided to try it again for O-Bon and the Bon-Odori costume competition. Since Bon-Odori is traditionally done in a yukata (summer kimono), I practiced getting in and out of womens' yukatas. It turns out yukatas for women are much more complicated to wear than yukatas for men, but with YouTube as your friend it is not that bad.

Working on the slit mouthed part, by gluing tissue to the face

After having done zombie makeup a few times, I am getting reasonably good at doing blood and gore effects on my face. It is more difficult if you want most of your face to have a natural skin color, though. Normally it does not matter if the gory parts are not skin colored, since I just paint the rest of the face in the same color afterwards anyway.

Trying to do eye makeup

Something else that turned out to be difficult was the eye makeup. The kuchisake onna is (according to the urban legends) a woman with strong flashy fashion sense, and would probably have strong eye makeup. Since I do not use makeup normally, trying to make this look good was difficult...

Adding some more tissue to fake stiches

Adding blood always helps covering up spots that look bad

I also spent 20 minutes in front of YouTube trying to tie a female style obi knot. The instructions included things like "and now you should have about 60 centimeters of obi left, so use that to fasten the knot" etc. But since I am not as skinny as average Japanese girls, there was more like 5 cm left, which made it difficult to fix the knot.

The end result was not great, but the new wig was cuter than the ghost wig I had last year so the result was slightly cuter than Halloween. One of the problems at Halloween was finding high heels in my size (impossible in Japan), so I remember having extreme foot pain. In a yukata you normally wear geta or sandals. There are no geta for women in my size either, but I have Japanese style unisex sandals that are fine for my feet. So that was nice.

When I got to the Odori Koen park in the middle of Sapporo, I found several of my friends there. One guy I know who works at Bic Camera (and who sold me my new camera the day before) was there so I asked him to take some photos of me with the new camera. I also met the couple that I had udon with for lunch. They had an even better camera with them, and sent me many good photos later, from when I was dancing the Bon-Odori.

At last years O-Bon, I made a small girl cry in the park because my ghost costume was too scary. This year no one cried as far as I noticed, but one small boy took one look at me and then ran away.

Waiting seven years for udon

Seven years or so ago, I was introduced to a very nice and very funny Japanese guy who also does magic. We are more or less the same age, but he had done magic for several years before I started. We were introduced by a common acquaintance because we all do magic as a hobby.

He used to work in an udon noodle restaurant run by his father. Now his father has retired and my friend is running the whole place. Since this restaurant serves really great noodles and also has a really great view, they are very busy. This means my friend is extremely busy of late, and we have not met much lately.

The restaurant is located quite far from central Sapporo. I have many times thought that "this summer I will find one day with nothing else planned and go there by bicycle", but if you work in Japan, finding a whole day with no work planned is not that easy, haha. So I have never been there.

A few weeks ago, one of my magician friends told me that he was going there with his wife and that they were going there with one of the regulars from our magic bar. He asked me if I wanted to tag along. I said that that would be great! Five minutes later, he told me that they guy with the car said that there was actually no seat available for me, so I could not go...

I met the guy with the car at a fireworks festival, and he apologized for not having space in the car and suggested we go some other day. That day finally came, and we went to have udon. When my udon making friend saw me, he was very happy about me finally coming there. I did a magic trick and he took a photo of me. I took lots of photos of the restaurant and of the food.

The food was indeed great. As was the view and the service. Then we went back to Sapporo and it was time for me to change into my costume competition gear.

Meeting lots of magicians

Photo taken using my phone to control the innocent looking camera standing all alone on a table

The day before "team Jonas" was scheduled to appear in the Bon-Odori costume competition, I bought a new camera. The costume competition usually has many entrants with impressive costumes, so having a good camera with you is nice. The new version of the camera I used up till now (but which I managed to break when falling down the stairs with the camera in a pocket) had just been released, so I bought that one. Ricoh GR II. A nice camera that does not do much more than the last version, but that is pretty good. The only really new feature is that you can leave the camera and control it from your cell phone. You can see what the camera sees in real time on the phone, and change any settings etc.

When I went out to get something to eat, I ran into lots of magicians. One guy was a student at my university and was in the magicians' club there a few years after me. I also met Birdie Koyama, possibly the most famous magician from Sapporo. He is more or less retired now, but used to be a big thing in stage magic and used to have his own magic bar in Sapporo. He has now moved to Niigata, but he was in town for a few days, he said.

Birdie Koyama has lots of magicians that trained under him. Several of them, and some magicians that are just friends of Birdie Koyama, were also there. Despite there being at least five magicians (there were people I do not know there who may or may not have been magicians :-) in the room, I was asked to do magic for a group of non-magicians. No one else was asked to do anything, so either I have to work harder to earn my food, or I am just that much more entertaining than the other magicians. Must be the latter, I am sure, haha.

Me doing magic

A photo that is almost but not exactly the same

People happy after seeing my magic

Making fake scissors

The kuchisake onna that I wanted to dress up as has a pair of scissors that she kills or mutilates people with. I figured that since I get stopped by the police quite a lot even when dressed normally, it would be prudent to not use actually dangerous scissors. So I bought some silver colored origami paper and made a pair of harmless fake scissors.