Wow, this is amazing.  Can’t wait to be in Okinawa.  Thanks for posting Jacqui

choukeru:

I went to a music festival called “Peaceful Love Rock Festival” today.

For some reason it really hit me hard after that that at this time next year I’m probably going to be packing up and leaving this place. Sometimes I think I can’t wait, but then I witness what I did today and want to stay here for ever.

After the last band, HY, the audience called for an encore. The band came back on, and declared that they would do a new song they’d written for peace, given the festival’s name, and the fact that two weeks ago was “Irei no Hi” - Peace Memorial Day - in Okinawa. Onto the stage they called some American chorus singers, because if they sang in both Japanese and English, they’d be incorporating two of the major groups involved in the war rather than just one.

They then called out 6 different eisa groups, who stood all around the stadium. Eisa is an Okinawan type of drum dance, seen in the above video (taken at an eisa festival we have called the “10,000-man Eisa Festival”. The song in the video is “Sanshin no Hana” by Begin, by the way - another beautiful song.) There were roughly 30 people in each eisa group, each person with a drum as in the video.

They then played this gorgeous song that I unfortunately can’t show, because they haven’t recorded it. But being in the centre of the stadium with 6 drum groups all playing simultaneously, with the sanshin and the music and the beautiful singing… the feeling was incredible.

And now it’s making me search YouTube for Okinawan music and getting me all teary-eyed about the fact that I one day have to leave this amazing place.