Time machine destination set to July 2019.. and engage! Okay I’ll stop doing that.
As I understand it, EJCA, or the Edmonton Japanese Community Association, holds (or held, depending on when you read this) a Japanese festival in Edmonton once a year or so, and this one that I attended was on July 13 2019, which was a Saturday. It ran from 2 pm to 8 pm, and took place at the EJCA Community Centre at 6750 88 Street in Edmonton. I was taking Japanese classes at the University at this time, and heard of this Japanese festival through that pipeline, and figured that it would be a good way to spend the weekend, especially since at this point of my life I had not yet attended an actual Japanese festival (i.e. inside Japan) in person, or even been to the country at all.
As always, since this took place so long in the past, this is more a picture and video dump than a blow-by-blow retelling of the event. The only other event I remember around this besides what I stated below is that I had to wait quite a while for the bus to arrive and take me home as public transit in Edmonton is terrible.
This EJCA Festival had both an indoor component with a market as well as an outdoor component with tents, dances, and more. In the indoor section, I met someone who was a coworker at the time, Shinya, though he’s since moved on from the team due to budget cuts. Here he is with his wife and kid, volunteering at a table at the event:
And here are a couple more pictures of the indoors part of the festival.
Food was handled via buying food tickets at the door and then redeeming them for food:
And here’s a bunch of food I got. I believe this was actually the first time that I ate a chocolate banana.
And here are some pictures of the outside part of the festival, set around a grassy courtyard.
And people dancing around a taiko drum.
Here’s some pictures of a poster that I saw at the EJCA tent:
And pictures of me, wearing a kimono and posing for a photograph against a backdrop poster with Japanese sakura trees on it (they were doing this service for free, as I remember).
There were stall games and other things too but I didn’t take part in those. I did take three videos of a dance troupe that was performing though, and two of them are preserved below.