Japan Festivals in Seattle

In Japan, autumn is considered the season for sports competitions and culture festivals. America doesn’t have those traditions, but some major American holidays such as Halloween and Thanksgiving come in autumn.
On October 12th, our students at both Edmonds and Shoreline held the annual HTC Japan Festival. (Actually, this is also the date of another American holiday- Columbus Day – the day that Columbus first landed on a Caribbean island.) At the Japan Festival, HTC students introduce some traditional and modern Japanese culture to the general students and college staff. The Shoreline students had stations for wearing yukata, learning kanji, using chopsticks, origami, the “face game”, and getting brush-painted kanji for visitors’ names. The Edmonds students took a more modern approach – providing Japan tourism information, pop music, and Japanese-style makeup demonstrations in addition to calligraphy and origami. But of course, the most popular table was the one giving out rice balls wrapped in nori. HTC students at both schools performed a dance to Soran Bushi – a famous fisherman’s folk song from Hokkaido.



Neal Colodner