The 28th there was a firework display in a nearby town that we were going to see. In Sweden we have fireworks on New Year's Eve and Eastern, so I always associated fireworks with snow, but in Japan it is a summer event. Emma put on a yukata and I wore a jinbei I bought together with Emma earlier. Yukata is like a more casual kind of kimono. If you don't know what a yukata is then you probably think it is a kimono. Kimonos are worn very rarely but yukatas are often worn in the summer when going to see fireworks or visiting summer festivals. If you walk around in a Japanese city or town in summer you are very likely to spot at least a few people in yukatas. There are also yukatas for men, and that is what I really wanted, but they are really expensive (10,000 yen and upwards). I chose to buy a jinbei instead (for about 1,500 yen). It is another traditional dress, but even more casual, consisting of a pair of cotton shorts and a cotton coat in thin cotton making it perfect for a hot summer day. It is often worn by men, boys, and some young girls on festivals and firework displays. A lot of older men wear it casually during summer. When wearing a yukata or a jinbei you usually wear a pair of Japanese clogs called geta. I have a pair of geta in Sweden actually. I got them a few years ago after my sister had been in Japan. If you want to see pictures of kimonos, yukatas and geta I recommend this site. 

When we went to the firework display we went together with Emma's parents. First we parked the car at a giant parking lot outside town. From there there were free buses to the festival area and then we walked a bit though town until we got to a harbour area where people were packed like...um...uh...really tight. We found a pretty good spot to stand and look out over the bay where the fireworks were being prepared on a couple of boats. The fireworks were grand and since we were so close the big ones covered most of one's field of vision. It was impressive. There were lots of fireworks that I have never seen before, but it is a bit difficult to explain how they looked, and I didn't get a good photo of any of them. My photo-doumentation-craze is quite disturbing some times. I can't see a beautiful thing and just enjoy it without taking a photo of it. It's like the camera is my eyes. Unless I see something with my camera "eye" I feel like I haven't really seen it. And so I viewed the whole firework spectacle through the viewer of my camera, taking pictures and video sequences and deleting the ones that didn't turn out very well. After watching for almost an hour and the grand finale was closing in, we left to avoid the big crowd on the way back to the parking lot. When we got to the parking lot we could see the last big fireworks far away above the trees. On the way home we stopped for some udon (a kind of thick wheat noodles). Udon and soba (buckwheat noodles) are Japan's original noodles. Ramen were originally Chinese noodles made of wheat flour and eggs.

The next day Emma's friend Mari came over and she brought a book she wanted me to translate. It was a children's book about how babies are born. Well, actually, I think it is a book for parents to use when they are asked by their kids about it. It was quite interesting actually. I started translating it to Japanese but since it took too long I switched to English after a few pages. Since the grammar in Swedish and English is virtually the same there is mostly no problem to translate between the languages. The only thing that takes time is actually writing it down. I also got a can of Sakuma's Drops (the candy I wrote about in an earlier log). It turned out that although the one I bought earlier was the same as in The Grave of the Fireflies the cover design is different. The one I got now featured the original old cover design just like in the movie. Hmm... I wonder if there is a single soul out there who cares about this (chuckle)... 

In the evening a couple of days later Emma and I went together with her father to a little snack bar, managed by an old friend of his. There were no other customers, and we had beer and a bit of snacks and food and talked a lot, the four of us. Among the snacks were a kind of wasabi-flavoured snacks that I have never tasted before. If you don't know what wasabi is, it is the green paste used between the rice and the topping in sushi. It is very hot, but in a very special way - you get a burning sensation inside your nose. These snacks tasted hot just like that. A bit later we got slices of watermelons, and these watermelons were the sweetest ones I have ever tasted. I never knew they could taste like this. Usually in Sweden, and most other places I have eaten watermelons at, the melon tastes like it is named - watery. But this one tasted all but watery. The others were amused by my amazement, and they told me that it came from a famous high quality watermelon district. I bet it was really expensive. After a while it was suggested that we should sing karaoke, since there was a karaoke machine there, but the machine didn't work. After calling the company she leased it from, Emma's father's friend got it fixed and so we started singing. She and Emma's father sang enka songs, Emma sang pop songs, and I sang the only Japanese song I knew well (Ue o Muite Aruko) and some songs in English. Between songs we continued eating and drinking, and I got a kind of cow muscle meat. It was very difficult to chew. It was similar to horumon (intestants) which I ate once last year, but not again. I sat and chewed for minutes until the others noticed it and wondered why I didn't swallow it. I explained that it was still in big chunks, and they replied that that is what is so great. It is concidered to be a good feeling when swallowing the big pieces, but I just feel uncomfortable, and if the chunks are too big I feel like I'm about to through up. Maybe it has a lot to do with the fact that I as child was old to chew the food well so I didn't choke on it. I don't know. Anyway, except that, it was a great evening and I had a lot of fun. Emma's father's friend was really good at singing enka too. Apparently, she was once close to becoming a professional. Not everyone get the pleasure of hearing a good enka singer sing just for you. But then again, not everyone even likes enka. If I haven't written it somewhere already, enka is a kind of Japanese blues. The music is often kind of similar to Finnish Tango. The people who listen to it is similar to the people who listen to dansband music in Sweden (a cheerful music style made specifically for dancing) - mostly people over 40-50, but there is a new generation of singers and listeners too. The singing style is very special and that is what I like about it. It seems to originate from older kinds of Japanese songs, which I also like.

A couple of days later we went to the nearby town of Kokura (where we went for the Taiko festival earlier), to see some of Emma's friends. There was a festival that day too and the streets were filled with people in yukatas and jinbeis. Emma and her friend, Chie, dropped into a clothes store after w had eaten, and that was the tiniest clothes store I have ever seen. I wonder if you could fit 10 people in there. Later we went to a bar/café and had some drinks and met another friend of Emma's. On the way home we stopped for a while and watched the closing fireworks of the festival over the rooftops, before we went home.

Another couple  of days later I saw the biggest butterfly I've ever seen. It was as big as my palm. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good picture where you can undersstand it's hugeness. I also saw an interesting thing on tv: a woman wearing a t-shirt with the text "se Svenska naturen på våren 98" (see the Swedish nature in spring 98). I never understood why she wore it, but it seemed it didn't have anything to do with the program.

There is a funny site that you should visit if you think it is funny with all the signs, clothes, bags etc with bad English written on them. The site is called Japanese Engrish. A picture of the "Scandinavian" bread-shop Hokuo's bag that I wrote about earlier is featured too. Just so you don't get me wrong - the funny thing is not that Japanese are bad at English (Europeans, Americans and people from other counties of similar languages are just as bad at Japanese...), but the fact that companies don't seem to care about spelling and grammar when they print it on various products. In most European countries there is always a competent person to check those things before it goes to print. It is not like the Japanese companies can't afford it. I have often heard the explanation that the English usually is not really for foreigners, but for Japanese who think it is cool (just like kanji on a t-shirt or as a tattoo etc is concidered cool in European countries), but there is also road signs and such, obviously intended for foreigners, with strange formulations and misspellings. I wonder why.