August has not been good to my wallet as festival season came along like a bus. The net result of this is a sudden loss of internet at home, so despite all the interesting things that have happened, I cannot write anything about it! Thank god for short moments in Internet cafes.

Anyway, the festival season is upon us, both the modern music sort and the traditional. The end of Obon heralds the start of Natsu-matsuri (Summer Festivals) to see us through the remaining steamy days of summer before the cool of Autumn sets in. Festivals take a number of guises although they typically involve a parade of a float from the local temple, dances and many food stalls. Occasionally however there will be a festival that takes a more interesting form, like Koenji’s Awa-Odori, held on the 23-24 August.

The Awa-Odori is a long parade of dancing by 188 groups around the streets of the Tokyo suburb. Featuring 12000 dancers, it is the second largest of its kind in Japan and attracts over 100 000 visitors who line the streets with beer, food and a carnival mood even, as evidenced this year, with the rain falling heavy on our heads.

The festival began at 5pm, although my friend and I got to Koenji at 6:30 – after getting lost on the train somewhere around Kichijoji first. We were shepherded down a street parallel to the festivities; an agonising position as the music and shouting could be clearly heard a mere street away all the while we were being led away from the parade. Thankfully the police were pretty ineffectual at stopping people go down roads with ‘no entry’ signs. Their attempts at preventing us went as far as shouting ‘Hairimasen!’ with no follow up. A quick dodge of the police and we had found our spot among the umbrellas with a clear view of the dancers.

The groups shouting to the drumbeat danced along the street – some more energetically than others – in a deeply traditional Japanese style. There was something wonderfully tribal about it, so very entrenched in tradition that for a moment the modern world of Japan was forgotten in a whirl of colourful yukata and enacted stories of demons and gods. It amused us to watch both the spectators letting their hair down with beer and singing and the dancers jump around despite the rain. We wondered how many were salarymen, how many were gals, how many were obaasan… the usual boring and restrained characters put aside for one night as the community got together.

Each group had similar dress, with happi coats for the men and women who led the groups with dancing that skated over the road and then the ladies in yukata. Some of these yukata were stunning, resembling a sakura tree in bloom or gentle colours that reminded one of a tropical beach. Their hair was intricately held up with sparkling hair pieces and atop their head, a curious wicker hat that reminded me of the Gelupka sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Their dancing style, with elegant precise hand movements and feet that tottered on tiptoes in lacquered geta contrasted starkly with the violent movements of the other dancers, so much that as the other dancers moved between the women, it was like a fire dancing dangerously close to a delicate fire.

We watched the dancing for two hours before the rain got to us and we headed indoors for some food. While the Awa-Odori reminded us of summer, the cold rain was distinctly Autumnal and ramen (from a Chinese restaurant no less) was required before we joined the crush for the train home.

My small town had a Matsuri recently too, over the weekend when I had to work. It was fascinating watching them set up for it, building stages and collecting floats near the station but I was sad not to see it. Maybe next year.

Before I found out about the Akihabara attack yesterday, I had seen something on television that somewhat impressed me. Eco matters – the topic du jour in the US and UK – have reached out to Japan in the form of Touch Eco 2008. Japan has an interesting attitude to Ecological matters, demanding we sort our trash rigourously into burnable/non burnable/ bottles etc for recyling and advertising energy saving air con units all the while Shibuya and Shinjuku emit more light pollution than your average African state. While there is increasing promotion in using ‘Eco Bags’ for our daily uses, there is also a love for the plastic bag, such as the banana I bought from my local conbini this morning; like a present it was packaged in a clear plastic wrap all tied with a small gold bow. Touch Eco 2008 has manifested itself in Tokyo suddenly as a series of Expos and Festivals – I encountered one such in the approach to NHK Hall – although these have been criticised for lack of actual ecological content. The Expo in particular was accused for displaying products that actively against the issue, for example.

That said, the approach to raising eco-awareness that I saw on TV last night was much more admirable than Live Earth, despite being on a smaller scale. Live Earth I had problems with. It was a good cause, of that there can be no doubt but surely a concert in Wembley stadium with all the energy use that implies cannot be the best way to go about earth saving. On NTV last night they continued with the idea of a concert as awareness raising but taking a much different tack employing many of Japan’s numerous ‘talento’ in the process for a worthy cause.

The premise I watched was a challenge to put on a proper rock concert (albeit only one song) entirely from human power. I admired this approach, it neatly highlighted how much energy it takes to put on one dimly lit song and using humans to generate that electricity was a clever sense of ‘just desserts’ for our wasteful species. The first challenge was to charge the microphones: each mic required two batteries and for eight people that became 16 batteries. The batteries were charged by harnessing the energy output by someone running. This thus required 16 talento to run a certain distance to get the power needed. Then the task was to generate enough wattage to make small bulbs light up and give power to the electric guitars for the during of one song, specially written for the event and performed by Johnny’s band, Kanjani8. Around 50 furiously cycling talento would be needed for this job: the exercise bikes hooked up to cables were on a platform and the various volunteers ready at their bikes. At the count they began to cycle fast as the band began to play. This continued for four minutes until the song was over and talento power had been exhausted. It was a rousing success and followed by a long documentary section explaining the creation and exploitation of oil in the world.

Although slightly all for show, it at least demonstrated how difficult it is to perform normal functions without natural resources and how much we would find ourselves adrift if they were gone. It was gone in a moment though as normal service resumed with full stage lighting again – much like the moment darkness at Live Earth. For all I could criticise this reversion back to the norm it was at least an effective way to raise the idea of eco awareness. It stuck in my mind at least as I instinctively then turned off all the unnecessary lights in my apartment and certainly a better way of showing the need to be both eco aware and careful with our resources than Live Earth. Even with all this though I couldn’t help think about Shibuya and Shinjuku, and like all these awareness raising efforts there still remained the niggling thought that if they really cared, they would turn those two cities off.