Amami Superman Photography

They have several festivals that the different towns in Amami hold. This one is the Ayamaru Festival. Ayamaru is in the northern part of Amami just past the airport.

This is the family of a good friend of mine, Shelley Gehret Nishi, who lives in Kasari in the northern part of Amami. I'm terrible with names and I can't remember her husband's name, so I apologize. Their oldest, on the left, is Tyler and the girl on the right is Isabel. Their family is apart of a famous taiko group here in Amami. I've only seen a few of their performances so I was happy to see them here today. Tyler is still only in elementary school and he performed with the group today. I was impressed and I can only imagine how proud they are of him.



Shelley's husband is on the large taiko in the back. You can't see Tyler in the photo but he's in the back on the left. It was loud where I was taking photos from so I can only imagine what it would be like right in the middle of it all.



It must take quite a bit of stamina to beat drums like this. How many hours of practice and how many blisters? I imagine their hands are callous from all the practice. I play around on the guitar and my finger tips have calluses, but to continually beat a drum with something the size of a shovel handle or bigger must tax the hands.

This performance was pretty impressive and I enjoyed it a bunch.



During festivals they have big tubs of gold fish that children can try to catch with rice paper paddles. It takes quite a bit of talent to catch gold fish with a paddle made of rice paper. The gold fish swim around and rice paper rips incredible easy when wet. They have a simpler version of this where the children don't go for gold fish but super balls. Jade decided to go for the super balls instead of gold fish. She was only able to get two balls before her rice paper paddle ripped completely. Some of the more talented people can catch several gold fish with one paddle. I've seen someone catch twelve gold fish with one paddle. I've heard they actually have competitions for this.



I've been trying to take more photos like this where the subject is in focus and the background is out of focus. A good friend of mine who lives in Kyoto, Jeffrey Friedl, is a master at this. I absolutely love his photos. Also, I used the vignettes effects in Lightroom on this photo. I think it's the first time I've posted a photo using these effects. I thought it turned out OK.

One other thing I'd like to mention is Jeffrey Friedl produces many useful plugins for Lightroom. If you use Lightroom, and are so inclined, I suggest you check out his plugins here. They've made my photography blogging experience much easier and more pleasurable.



Minami Kizuki is an upcoming artist here in Amami. She will soon release a CD of her work. I enjoyed her performance, but I have to say, they had a bit too much artificial smoke during some of her songs.



Minami Kizuki brought out a shamisen and Shelley's husband came out to accompany her on the taiko. I thought that was really cool.



In a previous post called 2006 Hachigatsu Odori, I posted a bunch of photos of the different villages around Amami getting together in downtown Amami. This particular group is from Sani. Sani is the most northern village in Amami.



I thought it would be cool to take a slow shutter shot of everyone dancing. I don't know if you will like it but I thought it turned out kind of nice.



After the hachigatsu odori, they had a group come out that did a fire dance. It was the first time seeing anything like this in Amami so I chose a few photos of this. I didn't know how I should photograph this, but I chose to use a slow shutter speed.









I posted the photos I took of the Amami Festival fireworks but I thought I would post a few more of these. The reason I chose to post these was I didn't have very much human element in the Amami Festival fireworks procession. Just prior to this, there were loads of people watching the stage, but as soon as the fireworks started, they all moved to the port just on the other side of the tents you seen in the background.



By the time I changed my lens, most of the people had moved out and it was kind of a lonely site. I'll have to plan better next year.

"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.