The Vegetarian Festival

Yesterday was crazy busy!

I went to Nagoya to see the boy's band play at Diamond Hall. You can check them out here. Actually both of our boyfriend's are in Cutie Pi (mine plays trombone and Sarah's plays drums), we are very inscentious.

After his band, I stayed to watch The Cherry Cokes. If you can imagine, they are a Japanese 'Irish' punk band. It was a fun show and I'm definitely glad I went, since I got to see a few bands from Tokyo that I don't get to see much.

But before the show I went to the Vegetarian Festival in KYOTO. Now, if you don't know the geography of Japan, let me explain...Kyoto is north of Osaka, it's about a 30 minute train ride from my house. When the festival finished, I took the train back home. Then drove my car up to Maibara, which took about an hour and a half. Then I parked at that station and took a train to Nagoya, which also took an hour and a half. I had to drive up there and park, because the last trains out of Nagoya couldn't get me back to my station. I got back to Maibara at midnight and then drove home in a record hour. It's Monday morning, I'm at work and feeling kinda tired, especially since I'm going to do it all again...Tomorrow, one of my favorite bands, Strike Anywhere, is coming to Japan!

Anyway, onto the festival...

So we planned to hand out our zine and see if we could get any donations, but those plans were thwarted. Apparently, you have to have permission to hand out free magazines in a public park. (i.e. You need to give the festival organizers money!) Whatever, it worked out for the better. We went to the three animal rights groups tabels (JAVA, ALIVE, No Fur Osaka) and showed them our zine and asked if we could leave our zines at their tables. They all more than happily agreed and we witnessed our zines being picked up by many people. This saved us a bunch of time of having to bow repeatedly in the rain while handing out our zine. So with that accomplished, we took a stroll around the festival. I'd say the majority of the tables were food stalls. We learned about a few new restaurants that we will hopefully have the chance to check out. There were also a bunch of shops selling things like handmade soaps and lotions. A few stalls doing free reflexology. And a few other NGOs dealing with things like hunger or the environment.

You can see the women in black is straightening up our zines on their table.

One of the anti-fur tables. Unfortunately, most of their pictures were from the PETA's rather go naked campaign (on the other side of the wall). Hopefully, that welfare crap won't take hold in Japan. But I'm not holding my breath. A general lack of a women's rights movement doesn't help things.

This year's festival had more tables than last year, which was good. Unfortunately, it rained the whole day, so I'm sure some people didn't come. The animal rights groups tables had even better displays this year than last year and very central positions, so hopefully many people saw what they had and took their literature. Thankfully, I didn't see anyone wearing fur, but loads of leather boots and handbags. I got a few new pins for my bag and some stickers and some anti-fur cards to hand out to people I see on the streets.

--Pamela