Weekly Discoveries

Short (sometimes) videos or stories about interesting Japanese culture, language, entertainment, and many other things.

Japanese Kagura

Pre-Covid, the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum put on regular performances of Kagura for English speakers. In late 2020, they decided to put up some live streams on YouTube since they couldn’t hold any live performances.

Kagura is an ancient  form of Japanese Shinto ritual ceremonial dance. It consists of lively costumes, some quick costume changes, demon masks, Japanese music, and story-telling. Colorful costumes are sometimes changed quickly during the performance, many times I didn’t even see the change and only noticed that the colors of the costumes had changed. I had to go back and watch to see what they did to make the costume changes. Mask changes are fairly magical also, happening without you seeing, leaving you wondering where they are hiding the masks.

The following video has English subtitles, however the few instances of singing are not translated. The introduction starts around 26:28. There is also a question and answer session that starts around 1:15:26. This story is about an earth spider (demon) that tries to poison an emperor by disguising itself as the emperor’s maid and giving him poison.

The RCCBC Kagura Channel on YouTube has many different plays and short videos posted.

Gundam

Have you seen pictures of the massive ‘life size’ Gundam statue? Well now there is a ‘life size’ moving Gundam in Yokohama. I have never really watched Gundam, but this huge one moving like a robot is amazing.