Our Band From Japan

One of the things about Chiang Mai that’s both frustrating and fun, compared to London, is its size.  On the one hand, there’s not much going on most weeks; on the other hand, the need for entertainment (and the fact that everything is so much closer together) means that it’s easy to be lured out to things I might not have thought of attending otherwise.  In London, you could tell me that Jeremy Irons, Maggie Smith, and David Tennant were appearing onstage together in a play based on scenes from George R.R. Martin’s as-yet unpublished next novel, and that there was going to be free wine and a flaming-sword-swallowing act during the interval, and I’d still probably ask what Tube station it was near and google night buses before deciding to go.  Here:  traditional dance and a chance to purchase Japanese noodle dishes that are slightly different from Thai noodles?  I’m on it like white on rice!  Or noodles!

Which is how I ended up at the Lanna (Northern Thai)-Japan Festival.

It was a fun night, actually; it’s a kind of annual cultural exchange festival, with a stage in front of the Folklife Museum to showcase arts from both cultures, and about a dozen food stalls, as well as a few hawking cheap package tours to Japan.  Thai food stalls outnumbered Japanese, of course, even with the Sunday night market and its wealth of Thai food a few steps away, because Thai people are, to an outsider’s eye, immensely picky about their food.  Just ask someone from Bangkok about “weird” northern Thai food, or ask someone from Chiang Mai about how Bangkok residents do noodles “wrong” – and that’s without even getting into food from other Asian countries!  I, of course, ate all of it, because, as has been previously established, I am a goat.  The Hiroshima-style yaki (cabbage inside an omelet) and the teriyaki skewers were the best, but there were also noodle and rice dishes, fried vegetable croquettes, sweet rolls, and sushi (which I stayed the hell away from, Japanese festival or not – raw fish that’s been sitting on a market stall for hours is the Russian roulette of food).  There was also the Mystery Food, although I never got to taste that.  Okay, this requires a little explanation:  After a while, I started seeing several people with this… food, dripping oil and wrapped up in tissues.  It looked a lot like cheese fried in batter, so naturally I became a cheese-seeking missile.  I managed to track down the epicentre of the cheesequake, only to find a stall that was just cleaning up from something.  They definitely had trays with the remnants of flour and breadcrumbs, but no cheese in sight.  I scoured the rest of the festival without luck, so that must have been the right stall, making me wonder whether it had actually just been gloopy flour dumplings I’d been seeing.  After all, cheese isn’t really a major ingredient in Japanese cooking… right?

Then, no sooner did I sit down to watch the performances than a young guy took the seat next to me and tucked into his bowl of Mystery Food.  I sprang up and ran back to the stall – only to find that any hint of food was long gone, and it had now become a medical tent!

O MYSTERY FOOD WHERE ART THOU?

I could really go for some fried cheese right now.

The performances themselves were a mix of Lanna and Japanese, introduced by two women; it actually took me a minute to realise that the Japanese host was in a traditional Northern Thai longyi, sleeveless top, and scarf, with orchids in her hair (and rocking the look), while the Thai host was the one sporting a red kimono.  The Japanese delegation was miles ahead in terms of the variety of acts.  There was an aikido demonstration by a Chiang-Mai-based dojo (which I loved, mostly because the opening bout involved a tiny Thai girl of no more than nine taking on an entire queue of older students and flipping kids twice her size, followed by some self-defence demonstrations in which a woman repeatedly disarmed a hilariously skeezy-looking guy with a yellow plastic gun); a traditional fan dance by rows of small girls in kimonos; a more modern dance/aerobics regimen to music by a bunch of grimacing teenagers in matching silk jackets, which ended up looking more like an ROTC drill than anything; and a quintet of female musicians in stunning red gowns, playing Western classical selections on traditional instruments (and, in one case, accompanying a woman singing Gershwin hits, because that’s really what you think of when you think of Japan).  On the Thai side, it was basically the same group of young male drummers, with their wall-sized drum kit and gongs, accompanying the same group of dancing girls in a succession of different outfits.  However, I’ve got to give the Thais points for using actual traditional music.  Not one of the Japanese acts did the same; even the formal dance number was set to vintage 80s J-pop.  Maybe they thought that would appeal more to foreign audiences?

There was also a rice-pounding demonstration, which is a lot more hardcore than I ever realised.  Essentially, it takes two people:  the first one wails away at the rice with a hammer the size of Mjölnir, but it’s the second job that really takes guts.  That person has to pat the rice back into place between hammer strikes.  The two men demonstrating had a lightning-fast rhythm going, but I hate to think what would happen if one of them fell out of step…

One of the best parts of the festival was the crowd-watching, though.  Quite a few people turned up in Japanese dress, but exactly what that meant differed widely.  Among the many variations on kimonos and other forms of traditional dress, you also had modern-looking silk jackets, a few teenage girls rolling out the head-to-toe Gothic Lolita look, and one old Japanese man wearing animatronic bunny ears.  I thought at first that he was selling them, but no – just wandering around, beaming at people and waggling his animatronic bunny ears.

I love this town sometimes.