Japanese cultural festival a reason to get dressed up

By 11:30 a.m. Saturday, it was already complete chaos at the dress-up booth at Seattle Center House.

About 25 people between the ages of 2 and 52 crowded onto a small stage, pulled off their sweaters and parkas, struggled into ankle-length Japanese gowns and paraded in front of a triptych of wobbly mirrors, posing for friends wielding digital cameras.

Most of the Japanese gowns, called yukatas, went on like bathrobes. Simple enough. The hard part was tying an obi — a 12-foot satiny sash — around the rib cage, and then folding, twisting and yanking it into a butterflylike bow. For anyone whose body is more Dolly than Twiggy, it feels a bit like slipping into a beautiful sausage suit.

"You can still breathe? You tell me when you can't breathe, yes?" asked a 25-year-old Japanese exchange student, her voice straining with the effort of cinching a teenager into a pretty red costume. The teenager nodded, her cheeks flushed.

The dress-up booth was just one of more than 100 different booths and activities at the 33rd annual Seattle Cherry Blossom & Japanese Cultural Festival, which began on Friday and ends at 6 p.m. today.

The festival was born in 1976 when Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Miki gave 1,000 cherry trees to the city of Seattle to celebrate the American bicentennial. This year, between 5,000 and 6,000 people are expected to make their way to Seattle Center for the event, featuring everything from sake tastings, drum concerts and martial-arts demonstrations to hands-on art projects.

Karin Zaugg Black, president of the Seattle-Kobe Sister City Association and a member of Washington state's Japan-America Society, has run the dress-up booth at the festival for the past few years.

"Japanese culture is so diverse, and so contradictory sometimes," she said. "You have this woman wearing a kimono, standing right next to a schoolgirl wearing some crazy outfit. You have formal tea ceremonies, right next to manga anime. There's always more to learn."

Indeed. On one side of the dress-up booth, a gallery of photos and newspaper articles tells the story of internment camps for Japanese in the U.S. during World War II. On the other side of the booth, the young women of Tsunami Taiko, a local drumming ensemble, perform thunderous, intoxicating rhythms on taikos — barrellike drums that were once used by Japanese rice farmers to scare away evil spirits.

The diversity within Japanese culture itself is one thing. Add Japanese-American culture and you've got a whole other diverse culture, too, said Kanako Kashima, a member of the Seattle Miyagi-Kai Koto Ensemble, a musical group that also performed Saturday afternoon.

"This festival is nice because it allows the Japanese-Americans and the Japanese nationals to come together, to explore each other's culture," she said. "Obviously we have a lot in common, but we're so different, too."

Here's a good example: Kashimi and most of the other members of her Koto Ensemble grew up in the Seattle area, but they've all been playing the koto — an oar-length stringed instrument from the 11th century — since they were kids. The last song in their set used the gentle, twanging sounds of traditional Japanese music to re-create the theme from Rodger and Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music."

Two blue-eyed friends from Lynnwood took in the Koto Ensemble's show from the back of Fisher Pavilion. Both were dressed in platform flip-flops, full Kabuki theater-style make up, and makeshift kimonos. Think Marilyn Manson meets "The Last Samurai."

"Japanese rock music is still really underground here. We want to draw people's attention to it," said Anna Miketinas, 22, a Japanese major at the University of Washington, her painted-on red lipstick bleeding into her caked white face powder.

"Sometimes all you have to do is expose someone to something new for them to realize it's awesome."

Haley Edwards: 206-464-2745 or hedwards@seattletimes.com