Kimonos and Crazy Shimizu

Last Saturday, myself and a few other ALTs joined in on a cultural performance which was held at Gifu station. Megan and I were to dress up as princesses. Lisa was a queen, Craig was a king, and Doug was some kind of samurai. It was a pretty crazy day actually. It started off with us being greeted by this guy called Shimizu. He was a crazy man. He decided that Megan, Doug and I should see some comedy performance. He started sprinting through the hallways of the station, and we struggled to keep up with him. I decided his name would then be Crazy Shimizu. He slowed his pace as we sprinted past a few paintings which he started flailing his arms at. I think he was saying that he painted them. Somehow I don’t think he gave us enough time to appreciate the artwork. We arrived at the comedy performance, and we just stood there. I have no idea what we were in a rush for. We couldn’t understand the comedian because surprise surprise, he spoke Japanese!

Lisa and Craig were the first to go on stage. I didn’t see any of it because I was behind the stage. Apparently Lisa had 9 layers of kimonos put on to her. Sounds pretty cool I reckon. I don’t know what Craig did, I think he just went out there parading his wooden paddle stick thingy. It was funny watching the audience from behind the stage. Crazy Shimizu was video taping the performance. He was very artistic. At one point, I saw him going up an escalator with his video camera still focused on the performance. A few seconds later, he came down the escalator.

Megan and I went on next. We were dressed in traditional kimonos. It was such an effort to put them on! The first layer was some kind of wrap around white thing. It looked like a nightie or something. Then the team of two ladies started slapping bits of material on me. Apparently my right shoulder is lower than my left shoulder, so they evened it all out. After these weird bits of material, they then got to work on flattening me out. I don’t know how many sashes were tied around me, but I did find it hard to breathe. After the girdle type things, the kimono was finally put on! Mine was nice. It was a pale kind of blue with flowers around the bottom. Megan’s was cool. She had a larger print, and a darker greenish blue colour.

However, they didn’t tie our obi until we got on stage. Our performance was basically to stand there and have a couple of ladies trash us about tying the obi on. It was a massive effort to stay standing! I don’t have pictures of the stage performance though. Apparently we are going to be getting a video of it from Crazy Shimizu.