St. Louis Japanese Festival or Why White Girls Should Not Wear Kimonos

Labor Day weekend in St. Louis has many traditions; the Greek Festival in the Central West End, the Blues Festival and the Japanese Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens to name an obvious few. This year for the first time in our collective lives, my family attended the Japanese Festival after many years to saying we were going only to be otherwise occupado or having missed it due to weather.

For year's I have imagined what this festival would be like, particularly since as a kid I was fascinated by Japanese culture, their art and the language. My mind created vivid scenes with Japanese women in kimonos walking in small groups with their feet shuffling along in their wooden geta, faces done in the traditional white with little red lips; Japanese men in toggle buttoned jackets or long hanfu robes. Parades of Geisha and Kabuki actors and Japanese children running with koi kites; Sumo wrestling in a open ring; Tai Chi practitioners in their 80's, slowly moving from pose to pose.

But you know how it works when you've looked forward to something for too long and you allow your mind to create visions of the place or event long before you experience it; the real thing rarely lives up. Instead of my glorified expo of Nippon culture, I got fat anime kids in goofy costumes, dorky old men that obsess over little trees and pale, skinny white girls from South County beating the Taiko drums. While there were some, actually very few, Japanese people there, the vast majority of the performers and demonstrators were in fact American. Ok supposedly the girl that introduced the Sumo was of Japanese decent living in Hawaii, but even the Sumo weren't Japanese. Two of them were plain old Hawaiians and the really big fat nasty looking one was no Japanese yokozuna but just some big corn feed dude from the midwest that moved to Hawai'i.