Category: Urban Essays

The first anniversary of the city merger

Many cities, towns, and villages have merged over the past few years, including my home town. They had a one year anniversary ceremony and dedicated performances at the outdoor Nô stage near my parents’ house.

I’ve been familiar with this Nô stage since I was a child, and performances there are unusual, so we decided to go see them.
The starting time was 10:00 a.m. I calculated backward to when we had to leave our house in Fukuoka: it was pretty early for us.
However, after we took the bus to JR Hakata Station, we found out that something had happened. They said there had been a fatal accident on the Kagoshima line before 7:00 a.m. so the trains were all behind or cancelled.
We got on an express train that started a little later than scheduled, but it was changed to a local train because of the accident. We took almost double the usual time, missed the train for the Nagasaki line, and we had to wait more than half an hour at Tosu Station.
Chris said he used to have to wait for a once-an-hour bus in 30-below weather at an outdoor bus stop, so the cold was not so bad for him.
It was over zero but I still felt very cold waiting on the platform!

Some minutes after ten o’clock, about one hour behind our original plan, we finally arrived at my parents’ house.
Thanks to speeches by city workers, they took a longer time for the ceremony, so we were on time for the performances themselves.

The performances were ‘Yamagasa’ by the Kanze ryû troupe, and ‘Takasago’ by the Hôsyô ryû troupe.
The sound of the instruments, such as the flute and hand drums, was impressive and richer than we expected.

– YS, 27 January 2008

27 January 2008