Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Bizarrity of the most funktastically unexpected.

It’s the beginning of the end for my little village. In April, my village and 4 others in the immediate vicinity are joining together to form a new, large town. The purpose of doing so is probably somewhere between a desire to unify the people of this area, and a kind of massive tax dodge.

On Sunday, we had the closing village ceremony. I marched up a mountain with my Junior High students to ‘plant trees at the top’ although I had a nagging suspicion that we were all going to be ritually culled at the summit, to lessen the budgetary strain on the new town. Sadly, I didn’t die and we did plant trees, the steep mountainside at least affording us the opportunity for many a hilariously dangerous jape.

And so onto the actual ceremony which was chronically eccentric, even by Japanese standards. It was quite a major event for the village, and I had also been told (read: fed a questionable truth) that we were the first village in Japan ever to be ‘closed’. So apart from the predictable speeches, what went on?

Well, the new conglomerate town’s flag was presented. In Kumamoto (I don’t know about the rest of Japan) each town/village has a bespoke flag, so part of the ceremony was saying goodbye to our flag and welcoming the new one. The new and old flags were hung either side of the Japanese flag (kokki). They were then hoisted up in a slow, melodramatic manner, whilst all the villagers watched in silence.

Then the music played.

Now, at a time like this, it might be appropriate to play the national anthem, or the village anthem. But no.

“ba ba ba BAA. BAAA. Bababa BAAA BAAA”

The Star Wars overture.

Grinning like an idiot, I looked around to see who was sharing this joke. No one.

Next event - a concert. Although the music the two people played was extremely beautiful, they looked like they were completely whacked of their shits. The woman looked like a princess mononoke reject and was wearing about 20 dead animals whilst prancing around her keyboard like a childs wind-up toy gone horribly wrong, shaking her head in a mentalist fashion and occasionally twatting a drum machine with whatever limb was closest at that particular moment. The man, dressed something like Merlin the wizard, played a variety of Japanese wind instruments whilst violently spasming left and right with every marked end of a musical phrase. That said, they were obviously very talented folk despite their outwardly shortcomings, and really made me want to learn how to play the ocarina.

After this we went back to school and had lessons as per weekdays. Except this was a Sunday.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 27th, 2003 at 3:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.