13 Aug 2006 0842H

Ginza Fest & Korean Street Fest

I had a lot of fun at Ginza, but, it’s really cos the people we were with. I snapped some pix with my cellphone, the Razr, again cos, well, the SD500’s with Susan in Leiden. But really there weren’t much to photograph. As usual, it was a smattering of Buddhaheads, and the rest were gaijin, like, well, myself. There’s just not the kinds of immigration that constantly renew the community like they do among the Chinese, Koreans, South Asians, Filipinos . . . Huge area just set aside for eating, but mostly non-Asians.

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These guys were hilarious. These ojiis, the sansei, who were manning the raffle booth charmed me out of a few bucks.

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I tried to snap some pix of the JASC-JACL booth, because a lot of folks had booths there selling the exotic orientalia, you know, the calligraphy t-shirts, the exotic happi coats, the exotic haori, kimono, yukata, bonsai, all that stuff. It’s all oriental, which perpetuates popular misconceptions of Asians and Asian Americans, so . . . the community booth! We signed a petition calling on our representatives in Congress to support the rights of immigrants, which is good to see the JACL taking leadership on that issue. Promised to write Jean a check this year for their fundraiser. The president of the board said, just enter the raffle for the Acura TL. I was like, cool.

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On the way into the temple itself for an impromptu lecture/Q&A session about Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, which is the Midwest Buddhist Temple’s denomination, there was another ojii on-stage who was doing a pottery demo and doing a little commentary along the way, which I liked, cos, again, a lot of times we put the karate/kung fu/ninja/samurai/taikos out and you know, kinda self-exoticize. I kinda feel badly about the whole situation with the seniors too, cos I think they have a lot we can learn from them, but, we don’t necessarily spend so much time with them. Maybe that has to change.

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Then, Motts and Ryan begged off so, Elvin and I trucked off to the Korean Street Fest (eventually, after a few games of GRAW). Unfortunately, it was pretty late by the time we got there at Bryn Mawr and Kedzie, so, not many pics. Essentially, it’s a huge food, drink, and cultural community get together. This was a very heavily attended event. People were parking at Northside Prep and everywhere else, people were still coming in at about 9:30 when we left. Lots of drinking soju and eating of food among families. I think it speaks to the strength of the Korean community: a 24-hour TV station, two newspapers, radio. . . they even had a glossy four-color printed program, lots of corporate buy-in. We went for the kalbi, which made it worth it, I think. $5 for a plate of kalbi with fixings is awesome.

At the first kalbi tent, I wanted to snap some pix of these guys’ t-shirts, cos we were talking about this today about C vs. K in the spelling of Korea and, well, the C took precedent in this year’s World Cup gear (for the background on this, which goes back a long long way, click here) but the pic didn’t turn out so good. I set my Razr to snap pix at 640 x 480, but, instead, it sometimes snaps at lesser resolutions. Don’t know why, maybe something wrong with the autofocus…

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So instead, here’s my exotic orientalia for the day:

It’s hard to see here, but, this was a huge area, like, four blocks long, one end of Bryn Mawr had the traditional stuff, the cireum/ssirum, the pungmul, so on, on the other end it was the young people’s stage, with some pretty loud k-pop and breakdancing, and the food and drink was going until 11PM last night.

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Then we got some Argentinian-style gelati, which, while dense, I thought was less creamy, more icy, but I had a fairly strong coffee gelato which kept me up till about 4AM. Still, by the time we got back it was like, 10:30, so just called it a night. Long day, man.

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