Stoat - Where?

Obon is a traditional Japanese festival at which time the spirits of your ancestors are said to return and visit you. It presents a rare opportunity for Japanese families to come together, as just about everybody in the whole country has a few days off at the same time. Apart from visiting graves and praying for peace, many people also take part in one of many Obon Odori that take place around the country. These are essentially huge outdoor linedances to traditional Japanese music that last into the early hours. The most famous of these is at 郡上, a small town also famed for having the purest water in Japan. I didn’t go last year, so I wanted to check it out and luckily, I managed to get a lift there and back, otherwise I would’ve had to wait until the first bus at 6am this morning!
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Noh theatre is a traditional style of Japanese drama about as far removed from the modern-day TV stuff as you could imagine. It’s so old that it’s apparently akin to watching Chaucer, without having first rewritten it and drafted in Billie Piper. Like kabuki, even Japanese people don’t understand what’s going on half the time, and it has a reputation for being interminably boring and long. There is a joke, in fact, that the name comes from the cries of people who scream “NO!” when they are invited/cajoled into going to a performance. Of course, only gaijin would really get this joke, so it’s probably apocryphal. That, and it’s over 600 years old.
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