Fireworks Festival at Amehata, Hayakawa

The katyoo (section head) of the board of education and another board of education guy picked me up tonight and drove me to see a fireworks festival in the part of Hayakawa called Amehata. There is a dam at Amehata (Hayakawa gets most of its electicity from self-produced hydroelectric power) with a small lake sitting behind it. At the lake is an onsen whose name I have temporarily forgotten. The onsen includes a hotel portion, small restaraunt for guests, and, of course, the baths.

Also on the same spot is a gym, a dirt field, and a swimming pool. I guess the different parts of town all have their own gyms - apparently the Japanese government used gym and swimming pool construction to boost jobs at one point. In any case, this tiny town of 1500 has at least 2 that I know of, and one of them housed the Amehata fireworks festival. The only food at the festival was yakitori (grilled chicken) and "frankforts", basically hot dogs on sticks. For some reason they don't do buns here. They still have the ketchup and mustard, though. Not bad, but they could definitely use some bread.

The actual festival was basically some hundred or so of us watching random people sing karaoke. First they had someone who was *very* dressed up (traditional style kimono, etc), singing these old japanese songs. I suppose if you like those sorts of songs it would have been nice, but it sounds like crooning to me. On second thought, thats probably the fault of the singers. Then they literally solicited volunteers from the audience to go up and sing in a karaoke contest for which there were trophies for prizes. The BOE boss's daughter sang, but didn't win. Afterwards, another totally made-up woman in a prom-style flashy dress got up and sang old songs for a while, wandering thruogh the crowd shaking hands at the same time. Very odd, but amusing.

After the singing they held a raffle. At the door we were all given plastic fans with numbers. The numbers were our raffle numbers, and they handed out probably $200 worth of random junk. You would think raffle prizes would be kind of neat, but this was stuff like toilet paper, bathroom brushes, sponges, hand towels, wall clocks, etc.

Lastly, and finally, the fireworks started. We all went outside to the parking lot to watch them launch. They lasted about 30 minutes, and we were really close. I haven't seen fireworks up close in a long time so it was pretty fun. At the end they lit a long string of long-lasting fireworks along the edge of the lake. Very pretty.