koenji awa odori festival 2023 women's dancers

Dance On Over to Koenji for the Awa Odori Festival and Vintage 'Star Wars' Memorabilia

June 30, 2018

[Update: This post has had better quality pictures and video of the dancers and musicians from the 2023 Koenji Awa Odori Festival added to it.]

It’s summer movie season now, but in Japan, it’s also summer festival season. One of the biggest summer festivals in Tokyo is the Koenji Awa Odori Festival. On the last weekend of August, over a million people descend on the Koenji neighborhood to watch dance troupes take to the streets in a three-hour parade. In Japanese, the troupes are called ren — no relation to Kylo Ren, though there is a Star Wars tie-in with this post.

The first-ever Big Hero 6 parade float, featuring the characters Baymax and Hiro Hamada, in Tokyo Disneyland's 35th-anniversary parade, "Dreaming Up!" — The first-ever *Big Hero 6* parade float, featuring the characters Baymax and Hiro Hamada, in Tokyo Disneyland's 35th-anniversary parade, "Dreaming Up!"

Front-Row Pictures of Tokyo Disneyland's New 35th-Anniversary Parade

April 25, 2018

On April 15, 2018, a new daytime parade, “Dreaming Up,” made its official debut at Tokyo Disneyland as the park’s year-long 35th-anniversary celebration began. This parade replaced the long-running “Happiness Is Here,” which started out as the park’s 30th-anniversary parade.

Big-time, U.S.-based Disney blogs like WDW News Today and Disney Tourist Blog were on the frontlines for the earliest run-throughs of the parade, having descended on Tokyo in the days leading up to April 15. Incidentally, that day was a rainy Sunday—not the best parade weather. Since we didn’t want to contend with the opening-week crowds, my significant other and I opted to wait until ten days later before we ventured into the park.

The weather on April 24 wasn’t much better (they didn’t coin that phrase “April showers” for nothing), but we happened to get lucky and win the lottery for the parade viewing area. This enabled us to get front-row seats for “Dreaming Up” without having to stake out a spot on the ground hours beforehand.

The "Kodaki Fuji" view of Mount Fuji, as seen across Lake Shojiko in Yamanashi Prefecture.

The Gaijin Ghostwriter - Fuji Five Lakes

March 31, 2018

The original idea behind The Gaijin Ghost was to have a travel blog that would de-emphasize the blogger and make the reader the main character, rather like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where the reader is invited in with the words, “You’re the star of the story!” For a while, I even tried to adhere to a mandate of never using first-person pronouns here on the site. It can actually be tricky to write like that when you’re trying to synthesize subjective experiences into travel blog posts.

The Dual Nature of Rodriguez in Martin Scorsese's 'Silence' (With Photos of the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum in Nagasaki)

March 28, 2018

In the film Silence, the character of Rodriguez, played by Andrew Garfield, exists simultaneously as a Christ figure and a Judas figure. The most pronounced instance of him being framed as the former is when he sees his reflection morph into the face of Christ while drinking from a stream. Yet like the movie itself, even this scene opens up a prism of interpretations if you mark it as an allusion to the Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image as mirrored in a pool of water.

Left: mural on the Nemo & Friends SeaRider building at Tokyo DisneySea. Right: mural on The Seas with Nemo & Friends building at Epcot in Walt Disney World.

Nemo & Friends SeaRider vs. The Seas with Nemo & Friends

February 28, 2018

Nemo & Friends SeaRider opened on May 12, 2017 in the building formerly inhabited by StormRider at Tokyo DisneySea. More than just a new attraction, this ride actually brought a whole new theme to the area of Port Discovery in DisneySea.

In this post, you can see 30 photos of the attraction and how it integrates into Port Discovery, along with 4K video of the ride from front row and center in the motion simulator. As we compare the ride with its Florida cousin, The Seas with Nemo & Friends at Epcot, you can also see some additional photos of that attraction.

'Star Wars' at Disney's Hollywood Studios

January 31, 2018

This post serves as a companion piece to the Star Tours at Tokyo Disneyland - Guided Photo Tour. The 55 photos nested here should give a good comparison of what Star Tours and Star Wars look like at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. That includes glimpses of:

Characters appearing on stage in the Star Wars: A Galaxy Far, Far Away show
Handprints and footprints in the Chinese Theatre forecourt
Props and costumes on display in Star Wars Launch Bay
Captain Phasma leading a detachment of Stormtroopers in the March of the First Order
The kids show Jedi Training: Trials of the Temple
The exterior of Star Tours - The Adventures Continue and the Tatooine Traders gift shop
Merchandise in gift shops on Sunset Boulevard

'The Last Jedi' Press Tour Comes to Tokyo

December 8, 2017

There’s only one week left until Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits theaters in Japan and around the world. The global press tour for this movie has already been making the rounds in places like Mexico City, and on the night of Wednesday, December 6, 2017, writer-director Rian Johnson, producer Kathleen Kennedy, and stars Mark Hamill and Adam Driver came to Tokyo to promote the new film. One by one, their cars pulled up to Roppongi Hills Arena, where they took part in a red carpet event and stage greeting, followed by a Q&A and a special screening of 13 minutes from The Last Jedi at Toho Cinemas Roppongi.

Al Gore on stage at the closing ceremony of the 2017 Tokyo International Film Festival.

An Inconvenient Time to Talk About 'An Inconvenient Truth' and Its Sequel [TIFF-JP 2017]

November 17, 2017

Though he professes to be a “recovering politician,” Al Gore, the 45th Vice President of the United States, is a name that still might serve to politicize and polarize discussions with people of fervent, long-held beliefs. Especially when those discussions relate to the so-called “hoax” of climate change. Some voters who aren’t fans of Gore and didn’t cast a ballot for him back in the 2000 presidential election could very well reject what he says out-of-hand, simply because they have fixed notions about who he is and what he stands for.

In my experience, I’ve found that seeing a public figure in person (or maybe just seeing a public figure as a person) can have a disarming effect. It’s not so much being starstruck — mooning over a politician the way you would a celebrity — as it is just realizing that the face you saw on TV is a walking, talking human being whose body language you can now observe.

You suddenly find yourself staring at this living caricature whose intentions you must parse. Are they just a traveling salesperson, feeding you a line about something? Or are they a true believer? Do they have their heart in the right place?

In 'Logan Lucky,' the Code Word Is Capitalism [TIFF-JP 2017]

November 10, 2017

In Steven Soderbergh’s latest heist movie, Logan Lucky, “cauliflower” takes on special significance as a code word for criminal confederacy among the brothers Jimmy and Clyde Logan (Channing Tatum and Adam Driver). Don’t call them country bumpkins; the Logans are more like Robin Hood, by way of The Andy Griffith Show. When we first meet them, they both have honest jobs, but then Jimmy’s construction foreman sits him down and tells him, “I got to let you go.”

This is the inciting incident that sets the brothers down the path to a renewed life of crime in Logan Lucky. It seems someone in human resources saw Jimmy limping on the job, and now “the folks over in the big office” have decided his old football injury is an insurance liability. He’s fired for having a pre-existing condition, even though his disability is minor compared to Clyde’s loss of an arm in the Iraq War.

For the Logans, the cost of living in the USA is almost literally an arm and a leg. Jimmy’s construction job positions him as one of the working-class people who have helped build this country, laying down its infrastructure, but the American dream has failed him. Teaming up with the prison-striped safecracker, Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), and Bang’s own bumbling brothers, he and Clyde hatch a scheme to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway, which has a cash highway flowing into its main vault via pneumatic tubes. Over the course of two hours, what emerges in Logan Lucky is a caper that lightly interrogates the spoils of capitalism, as if that were the true code word to unlock the movie’s themes.

Tommy Lee Jones on How Festivals Free Filmmakers From Commercial Demands [TIFF-JP 2017]

November 3, 2017

Actor Tommy Lee Jones served as president of the competition jury at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival. During his parting speech at tonight’s closing ceremony, he shared these comments.