Bon Odori in St. Louis

The Japanese Festival held every year over Labor Day weekend at the Missouri Botanical Gardens has become an attraction for anime fans from St. Louis and the Midwest. I used to make the two hour trek to the gardens from Carbondale to St. Louis to enjoy the festivities and to see the traditional Japanese arts demonstrated. Now it takes me two minutes (seriously) to get to the Gardens. So you bet I’ll be at the festival all three days this year, especially since I’ll be taking part in one of the demonstrations.

It’s heartening to me to see so many anime fans taking their interest in Japanese culture to the next level outside of their love of anime by attending the Festival. I started out as a fan of Japanese history and culture and anime came into it as a part of the sub-culture. Now, the two are about equal, and this a good thing.

I suppose it’s OK to just like anime, just as I suppose it’s OK to just like Japanese martial arts, but you’ll never truly understand the depths of either of these unless you understand where they came from. So for anime fans, the Japanese festival represents offerings from the traditional as well as the modern aspects of the culture.

It’s all well and good to watch the happenings at the festival for the sake of comprehension, but it’s better to experience them through doing them. That’s why I joined the Bon Odori Club; so I could take part in the culture instead of just watching it. Bon Odori is translated simply as Bon Dance and is a traditional Japanese dance held on on July 13-15 respectively during the Bon Festival that honors the spirits of past ancestors. Each prefecture in Japan has its own style of dance and its own particular music. Bon Odori is essentially a type of line dance accentuated with graceful movements executed in time with music.

I’ve attended two practice sessions thus far and have learned 10 dances, seven almost pat. It seemed difficult at first (well, at least for me since I can’t seem to get when it’s the right and when it’s the left) but us newbies are getting the hang of it fairly quickly.

We’ll be having more practice sessions right up until September 2nd and hopefully are numbers will grow by the Festival. There are already a healthy number of more experienced members who are willing to help teach the moves and it’s inspiring to watch them dance. Montgomery Sensei is the woman in charge of all this and she’s been demonstrating Bon Odori at the Japanese Festival almost since the Festivals inception. She comes to every practice smartly dressed in a navy and white yukata with her hair held in place with traditional combs and pins. I feel downright disrespectful going in my jean shorts and a t-shirt, but that can’t be helped.

Some of the 13 dances the group will be performing are fairly easy and those are the dances that we invite the crowd at the festival to participate in. The other dances are a bit more difficult and make me leery about whether or not I’ll do them justice.

The Bon Odori is a wonderful way to connect to the traditional Japanese arts and to help understand where some of the new arts come from. If you don’t think the old and the new can coincide there’s a dance which begs to differ; it’s the Pokemon Ondo and it’s frick’n sweet. Even if you don’t like traditional Japanese dancing, come see us get down the way Pikachu would if he wasn’t Ash’s battle slave; it’ll be worth the price of admission!!!