Amami Superman Photography

"Hachigatsu odori" basically means "August dancing" in English. I don't know if it's a tradition in other parts of Japan but here in Amami they hold it every year after the funakogi races during the Amami Summer Festival. Small villages from all over the island come to Naze (the central part of Amami City), to sing the traditional songs and dance the traditional dances of their particular village. Although it may seem that the dances look alike, sometimes the songs sound completely different due to the diverse dialect they have here in Amami.

Back before they had tunnels and roads on Amami, a hike to the next village took days because of all the mountains. Going from the northern part of Amami to the southern part was unthinkable unless you went by canoe, in which case it still took days. This is the reason for the diverse dialects here. If you had an old person from the south and an old person from the north sitting beside each other, they would have a hard time communicating with each other. Over the years since the island has made roads and tunnels, there has come to be a sort of universal Amami dialect. Most of the younger generations use this newer dialect but few of the younger generations can understand the true dialects of their home villages anymore.



I want to say they had almost a half a mile of street closed off for this event but that seems a bit too much. Maybe a third of a mile. They basically closed off 3 connecting streets for this event. Here is a map of the streets used for this event. The streets they used are marked in a light red.



This is a typical picture of hachigatsu odori. The lanterns in the center of the groups have the names of the different villages participating. This particular group is from Ogasari. Ogasari is a village in the very northern part of the Amami. The tables set up around the lantern have lots of cold drinks and alcohol. It's kind of fun to watch the over toasty old men trying to dance and have a good time.



This lady was trying to say something to me but I couldn't understand what she was trying to say. I just smiled, nodded my head and then took her photo. I think she was kind of mad at me.




As I said before, there is always plenty of alcohol during hachigatsu odori and the police are always there to make sure things don't get out of hand. Although, I felt the number of police seemed to be quite a few more than recent years. I think this is due to the fact that they recently had a solar eclipse last month here in Amami and a lot of the visitors are still here. I was surprised to see how many foreigners were still here in Amami at the festival.



A yukata is summer time type of kimono. It's made from lighter type of fabric than a normal kimono. Yukata are mostly worn during celebrations like this in the summer time.

Yuma and Jade are cousins 4 times remove??? Basically Jade's great great grandma and Yuma's great great Grandma were siblings? I think that's how my wife explained it. Anyway, Yuma used to live in Russia for her father's work. She recently returned to Tokyo to start 1st grade. Yuma's grandparents live here in Amami and when Yuma returns to visit, we always get together. We also watched the solar eclipse together in Tatsugo last month.


This is a typical bow used to tie the obi for a yukata. It takes practice to tie an obi and since Japan has been going away from wearing kimonos on a regular basis, many people don't know how to tie an obi. Now when you go to buy a yukata, you'll find already tied obi's. It's kind of like tying your own bow tie or just getting one that's already tied and clipping it on around your neck.

"Matsuri" means "festival" in English. "Funakogi" is the type of canoe race they have during the festival on Saturday. The races start around 8:00am and end in the early evening. The people who enter the competition are very competitive and start training for it months in advance. I've had friends that train their hearts out for this only to come up short of taking first place and then cry their eyes out. It's really amazing how passionate they are about funakogi. You'd think it was the World Cup for soccer.

It's kind of hard to see but there's a person sitting in the front of the canoe facing the rest of the paddlers. This person is there to help keep pace. Usually they have a whistle they blow to keep everyone in time with each other.



This is the hardest part of the competition, making the U turn. The canoes aren't the most stable and it's pretty easy to flip them over while making this turn.



Many people have these drums and beat them to cheer on their teams. Most of the time these drums are used for the traditional dancing they do here in the islands of southern Japan. I know they have drums like this in other parts of Japan but they call these kind "tsuzun" in the Amami dialect. My mother-in-law was telling me that they used to make these drums out of horse hide a long time ago. She doesn't know what they use now to make them.



Although I wasn't born in Amami, I call this place my home. This is the kind of site that makes me feel good about where I live. The amount of people that come out to compete with one another and the amount of people that come out to cheer these people on is really astounding. I am proud of this island I live on.



Almost every team has shirts they designed for themselves. The shirts in the above photo say "85 Kanan Funaashibi 2009". The 85 is the year this group was born which basically means this group is made up of friends that went to school together. That would make the people in this group 24 years old. I don't know what the "Kanan" means. I asked my wife and she didn't know either. "Funaashibi" is two words in the Amami dialect. "Funa" means "small boat" (I think), and "ashibi" means "play".



The big kanji on this shirt says "yuhigumi". "Yuhi" means "sunset", and "gumi" (or kumi), means "group" or "team". This team is from Ankyaba which is a small village in the town of Tatsugo just north of Amami City.



This where they post the winners and losers of the competition. These guys made me light headed just looking at them. I carry a towel with me wherever I go to wipe the sweat away. It's may sound kind of gross but sometimes it's a life saver, literally. During midday, if you don't have a hat, you can get heat stroke very easy here. If you don't have a hat with you, just throw your sweat towel over your head. You can probably see a few people doing this in some of the above photos.










People like to see these kinds of races where most of the boats are close and it comes right down to a photo finish (which they do have just in case).

It was very hot and I was starting to overheat a bit after walking around for just a little over an hour. And I even had my hat! I went home and tried to cool off and get ready for the "hachigatsu odori" they have in the evening. "Hachigatsu Odori" basically means "August Dancing". It's a tradition they do every year and I'll post that in a different post.

I took some photos of a friend's yuinou (engagement ceremony), a few weeks ago. I posted a few but took loads more than I posted. I took well over 600 photos but I ended up selecting around 130 to give to him. I also took those 130 photos and made a slide show to some music and made a DVD for them. I thought it would be cool to share that slide show here. It's about 10 minutes long.

OK, here's the second half of the photos I took of the fireworks procession they had on Friday. As I said in my previous post, these photos are retouched to reduce the amount of smoke and they are also cropped a bit.

The above photo is completely faked. I took fireworks from other photos and stuck them in this one. This is something I would have like to have taken but it wasn't going to happen. You can probably pick out the different firework explosions from the other posted photos. I put them all together using Photoshop CS3. The original background photo was taken 7 minutes before the actual procession with a 30 second shutter speed.

Here in Amami, the first weekend in August is the Amami Summer Festival. They have an hour long fireworks procession on Friday. I've only been taking photos now for about 7 months but this is one of the things I was really looking forward to.

I did my best to study up on how to take photos of fireworks and it paid off, but things didn't go exactly as I thought they would. Probably the biggest problem I had wasn't so much camera settings or anything of the sort, but the actual fireworks themselves. Every photo I've seen of fireworks, while studying, had the screen full of firework explosions and it all looked really neat. The problem with these fireworks is they all shot up in the same spot and exploded in just about the same spot and it got ugly really fast if I kept the shutter open too long. I could only take maybe 3 or 4 explosions worth of fireworks. I read plenty of places that said something of shutter speeds longer than 30 seconds. I found that wasn't the case with this procession.

Another problem I had was smoke. I was continually checking the breeze throughout the day to see which direction it was blowing. I had 3 spots picked out and I decided just before I left where to go. The wind completely died down and the smoke didn't really blow away. Most of the photos are a bit touched to reduce the amount of smoke in the photo. Also, most of the photos are cropped a bit. There were two or three different places they shot the fireworks from and it was a bit of a pain to adjust the camera to get things framed perfectly while trying to figure out where the next group would be going up from.




These are half the photos I chose to post. I'll post the rest in the next post.

My friend, Daigo Nakatani, held his yuinou on July 11th and asked me to take the photos. I was honored he asked me to take them considering I've never taking photos of a yuinou before.

My knowledge of a yuinou is very limited but I'll try my best to explain what a yuinou is. A yoinou is an engagement ceremony where both families come together. To my knowledge, the ceremony is for the man to offer different things and money for the daughter's hand in marriage. It all starts out with some special soup I wasn't able to get a good look at.



They held the yuinou in a room at a hotel specifically made for ceremonies like this. They also have tatami rooms (bamboo mat rooms), but they opted for a room like this. This is the sign they had outside the room to let the people who are participating in the ceremony know which room to go to. They had a few other ceremonies in progress when we first arrived in the morning.



After drinking the special soup they brought out, the man's mother and father bring a list of the things being offered and present it to the woman's family. From what was explained to me, the list is a list of the things on display at the front of the room. The different things on display represent different things that are supposed to bring good luck, long life and things of that sort. I'm not exactly sure what those "things" are, so sorry. In the old days, the man had to go out and pay for these things but now days, they just rent them from the hotel or wherever.




Daigo's fiance's name is Hisami. Her mother runs a sort of hostess club. I wouldn't really call it a hostess club but it falls in that category. Her club is rather large and my wife's relatives go there for special occasions as a second place to go drinking after the first place. I've been to her club maybe twice and she is very good at getting a large group to have fun.







The next part of the ceremony involved the 2 families drinking the other family's sake. Hisami is drinking the sake of Daigo's family.







One thing that I really find fascinating is how the women in Japan can be so formal. From the flowery formal speech to the petite movements that make everything seem of the up most importance. I'm not trying to put Daigo's father down but I got a laugh when the next part of the ceremony was the "kanpai" (cheers speech), and after they drank he says, in a kind of a loud voice, "Umai!" which means "delicious!" It just reminded me of a old western where a cowboy would yell out "whiskey!", down the shot and slam the glass on the bar and say, "That hit the spot!"



The next part of the ceremony consisted of a light meal. The special soup they brought out is called "suimono", which they also drink during New Years.



After the "suimono", they brought out sashimi. They had tuna and kanpachi which I think is yellowtail, I'm not sure.





I'm unsure of the terminology of the obi. I know that an unmarried woman is able to wear a beautiful sophisticated tied obi while a married woman wears an obi that is tied to look almost flat as seen here worn by Hisami's mother.



Hisami told me that this obi was worn by her mother on her mother's Coming of Age Day when her mother was 20 years old.

I used 2 cameras to take these photos and took over 600 photos in the space of an hour and a half. I borrowed a Canon EOS Kiss F with a 18-55 f/3.5-5.6mm lens. It was my first time using a Canon and it wasn't a bad experience even though I was unfamiliar with how to adjust the different settings. The only thing I can say bad about the Canon was it had a pretty noisy shutter. I was kind of embarrassed to continually snap away with it. I can't say it was a bad camera or a good camera, but I can say that I still prefer my Nikon because I know how to use it, kind of...

There were plenty of other photos that I wanted to share but I had to cut them down as best I could and not lose too much of the story. It took me some time to go through all of them an pick out the keepers. I was pretty frustrated with myself. Most of the photos were out of focus or had motion blur. The lighting was poor even though they had this hideous floodlight type light shining from one of the corners of the room. I wanted to lower the aperture or up the ISO to get faster shutter speeds but I still don't have a feel for that kind of thing yet and was afraid of getting a too thin depth of field or a too grainy photo for some of the shots. Although I didn't take very many good photos, it was a learning experience. Just one thing that I realized, the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 isn't good for taking group shots. The center of the photo is in focus, but the people on the outsides are a bit out of focus.