ICU-sai

Let’s catch up on all the stuff I missed, starting with the day of ICU festival!

Okay, the ICU festival was held on October 31. You may think this an ill omen, but actually everything went beautifully – as performers as part of Soul Run society, we had to make our way in a little earlier to run through the dance once as a practice, get changed, and then run over to the stage in formation.

Rob actually got his hair cut for the dance – he had the symbol ‘tamashii’ 魂 (or the ‘soul’ of ‘soul run) shaved into his head. He tried to keep it hidden from the rest of the group until the day of the dance, with varying amounts of success:

You can see it in all its glory here.

Rei, our dancho (boss) and primary instructor, was first on to introduce us and get the crowd ready.  Then we had to file on neatly in our rows and get into position (in some videos you can see people shoving each other into correct position).

Then…we had to dance!

For Soul Run, we had been practicing avidly every day and often at night as well. Rei really forced us to put our everything into that dance, and I think it shows in the final product – it’s something really amazing to watch, and I’m sure that it’s not just me being biased, as I’m pretty terrible at the dance in general.

So after that we had no obligation to hang around with Soul Run anymore and met up with the Tokyo Gaidai group (and Kazuya) to enjoy the rest of the festival. Awesome things like eating doughnuts and taiyaki occurred, and then we had to be whisked away again for the Soul Run Otsukare meal (kind of like a ‘WOW WE ARE AWESOME’ meal for everyone involved)

And it was a very fun meal! We all sat around two long tables and cooked the food on a hot grill in the middle of the table, while everyone complimented Rei on a job well done and we handed out presents to Rei and Tatsuya (who was announced as the new dancho).

Apparently announcing someone as a dancho means that all the previous danchos have to kiss them. This is a pretty amazing country.

Yukako happened to be cooking while this happened, meaning she burned half of the food, but it was okay.

Sadly, Wataru (last year’s dancho) was a bit ill and drank too much, meaning Rei and a few assorted others had to take care of him. The rest of us split off into groups who either went clubbing or went to karaoke. We opted for the latter, and reunited with Gaidai-tachi plus Kazuya.

A pretty fantastic night in all.

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