Sunday, September 20, 2009

A Taste of Japan

On Saturday I went to an event called 'A Taste of Japan' held at ASB Showgrounds. It was a fascinating event. It was a real insight into Japanese traditions and the only event I watched start to end was Japanese Archery. The ceremony and the protocol that they follow is amazing in the sense that it is very meticulous and very slow.

Archers preparing to fire their arrows

A female archer fires her arrow

The archer's bow

After the archery session - I roamed around the hall taking photographs of people learning how to write in japanese and learning japanese crafts like origami and then there was a tea appreciation ceremony that I just photographed instead of sitting through it - since I am planning on doing something similar in Hong Kong.

The unwritten word

Learning to write

Hands and alphabets

Origami

Children learning japanese art

A mini japanese art exhibition

The tea-making ceremony

Japanese make awesome food - I usually consider it snack food because it is never enough to fill me up. :-) The number of japanese food stalls and different kinds of food was amazing and the smells were fascinating and the best part of all was that they were all reasonably priced.

Japanese savoury pancakes

Preparing the food

Steely exteriors

It was a good outing and I wish there were more multi-cultural events like these happening on a regular basis and that'll probably drive the point home that New Zealand is turning out to be a truly multi-cultural country where everyone just integrates into the overall society while still keeping their own culture well and truly alive.

That's me for now,
Amit

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posted by Amit @ 6:08 PM

1 Comments:

At 6:59 AM , Blogger d f mamea said...

i wish there were more multi-cultural events - forget not: there's the Lantern Festival for the Chinese, Fourth of July for the Yanquis, Pasifika for the ah, Pasifika peoples, Matariki for Maori...

i suppose those are for already well-established ethnic groups. a growing number of community fairs and such now have a component for more recent immigrants like Iraqi, Afghani, Somali, Georgian, etc.

i will hunt down and stab the person who starts humming Melting Pot.

 

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