John Stupart.com

As well as being the birthplace for my snowboarding career, Esashi also has a seriously awesome annual crab festival once a year. Going with a friend from Nayoro, I had intended to simply stay for a bit, eat some crab, take some pics and then go home, but it turned out to be much more!

Almost as soon as we arrived some very good friends of Shelly (Nayoro ALT) insisted we stay over the night and partake of much beer-goodness. The festival itself was situated around a horseshoe-shaped peninsula just outside Esashi, ringed with stalls stelling an astounding array of food, oddly enough including crab. We spent Saturday night drinking beer, eating some awesome seafood and watching the shows on the grand stage that had been erected. If I’d planned it a little better I might have been able to simply camp out at the park next door (there were quite a few tents there!), but regardless it was great fun. After the final fireworks display I went with my new-found hosts to a local bar for some more food and beer, extolling upon them the many unique features of South Africa, from monkeys stealing the fruit to chasing away the hobos begging at the robots.

AND THEN, as if one festival wasn’t enough, I went to Wakkanai on Sunday afternoon to get a haircut only to find that the entire street on which my barber was located had been converted into a festival area, with something close to 300 different stalls. This being Japan they mostly sold food, and a LOT of it, and it certainly wasn’t as awesome as Esashi, as most folks simply sold the same stuff as their rivals further down the road, but it was an interesting sight. The downside, of course, was that I couldn’t get a bloody haircut, which means having to make another drive to Wakkanai sometime soon. I’m tempted to try the local village barber dude, but they almost certainly know no English, and I don’t quite have the Japanese language confidence to specify a haircut in detail. Maybe I should just shave my head!

In the work department, conversation classes in the evenings are progressing quite nicely, and the past couple of classes have seen the student ranks swell from 4 to 8! A colossal number! This week’s topic: “What I would do with $10 million”. I’m guessing there’ll be at least one food-related reply! On that note, some of the mothers coming to the class made me some snacks to take home, which was pretty damned awesome! Fresh sushi and some small scallops which I turned into a really nice seafood stirfry were certainly welcome gifts, even if they weren’t asked for. All the better I suppose.

Here’s some video I took of one of the dance groups performing at the crab festival. They were on TV a while ago in a huge tournament. They’re #4 in the prefecture!