Japanese festival edition.

Little did I know that Boston holds a yearly festival of Japanese culture.

Now for a sort of Euro/American person, I eat a lot of sushi and I really like it.  In fact, my entire family eats a lot of sushi.  Considering we all originally hail from a land where food is cooked so thoroughly that the flavor of it is effectively gone, eating sushi is kind of unexpected.  I’d go even further and say that when I see uncooked fish, I just want to keep it that way.  Cooking, in my opinion, ruins it.

Well, anyway, I know that Japanese culture consists of lots more than just uncooked fish.  It would be small minded of me to distill a thousand year old culture into just a preference for fish, the uncooked kind.

What has really intrigued me over the years about Japanese culture is the fact that they are so good at melding things.  They take one thing from one place, put it together with something Japanese and create a whole other thing.  One book that I have taken a lot of inspiration from in my photos is one called Strange Fruits, which documented the street style of the Japanese people.  Mind you this was a book that came out about 15 years ago, way before street style was even a thing that people looked at, paid attention to, or was relentlessly documented on every blog from here to the end of the earth.

The Japanese did street style first and I’d say best.

Let’s have a look at the styles found at the Japanese festival.

Some where VERY traditional:

 

 

 

Yet others added embellishments to their costumes:

 

 

 

 

But then we get to what I love about Japanese and Japanese influenced style.  A little of the normal.  And a little of the abnormal: