Flower Festival

The first weekend of every June, my town has an Iris Flower Festival. Maybe some of you remember reading about this before. I’ve participated in the festival twice before as a “Flower Festival Daughter,” for which dressing up in a Japanese summer kimono is mandatory, as is being as photogenic as possible for the day. Because the festival organizers are now friends of mine, because they seem to enjoy the “international component” that having foreigners work as flower girl festival greeters brings to the event, and because this was to be my last Flower Festival, I asked if I could have a few other foreigner friends join me this year (in past years I was always the only non-Japanese flower girl). All in all, there were 9 flower daughters this year, including 3 foreigners, and a good thing too. The cold, rainy spring we had kept a goodly portion of the flowers un-bloomed by the festival weekend this year. As more than a few people mentioned, instead of the flowers this year, they had us!

The 9 "Flower Daughters."

Happy run-in with some of my elementary school kids!

My aerobics class teacher and her family!

Our job for the day? Hand out brochures and pose for photos!

Of course there was plenty of time to goof off too. :-)

The town's "Obon" Dance Group.

Joy and Sadaf enjoying all that is good about Tokigawa Town.

Invasion of the hikers! This is how almost all hiking groups in Japan dress, and we get a kick out of the hiking appropriate gear seen on almost all Japanese hikers, regardless of the hike difficulty (or lack thereof).

And then the day was done and we were left to our own devices in the flower fields, still armed with cameras.