Sakura

Last week, my brother, his gf and I were at the cherry blossom festival (hanami) at Kungsträdgården. Thought I'd post some photos of Swedish cherry blossoms, but it looks like someone beat me to it.

The celebration started off with a taiko drum performance. It felt rather anachronistic seeing this centuries old artform being performed in the middle of a city.

Look at them go!

Later, the chairwoman of the local Japanese club showed us part of a Noh play. Unfortunately we couldn't hear much of it since she wasn't wearing a microphone. It was extremely expressive however, and her forceful stomps even dislodged one of those red banners behind the stage. Cooler heads would say the strong winds might have been the culprit, but I'm sticking to my story.

The Swedish Kendo team was there to show off their skills.

No celebration would be complete without a fashion show. I believe these kimono are for everyday use.

These colourful kimono are for celebrations.

This is the Sakura Choir. They sang a few pretty songs, but by this time it was so cold and windy we were all shaking and had to get some actual cherry blossom photos before we froze to death, so we only listened to one and a half song.

I found some of the models "backstage" where some of my fellow gawking Swedes and I snapped a few photos.

This photo may seem perfect at first, but if you look closely her fingers are freezing. It was actually snowing at this point. I wish I were joking, but this is April in Sweden. I'm surprised any of the trees even dared to bloom.

The anime nerds were out in full force, celebrating the Japanese culture in their own quirky way, bless their hearts.

Cute teddybear backpacks were not an uncommon sight.

These European girls emulate the Japanese emulation of a European ideal. The mind boggles. Aren't they cute? How much time does it take just to get the hairdo right? And how much do those creepy dolls cost? Equal parts kawaii and kowai, if you will.

Cyril Takayama

I've discovered some excellent Japanese magicians thanks to the internet. One example is the Yamagami brothers (山上兄弟) who currently hold the Guinness world record for youngest magicians. The age thing is kind of gimmicky, but they're just so cute and great at what they do that you can't help but adore them. (In contrast, there's an extremely gimmicky magician who insists on pretending to be French, manhandling the language in the process: "Torés biaan!") My favourite so far is probably Fujii Akira, a skilled magician with a very amusing and entertaining act, who works almost exclusively with playing cards.

However, my latest discovery in japanese magic is Cyril Takayama, who strictly speaking is an American of japanese descent, born and raised in Hollywood. Despite only being Japanese on his father's side, his Japanese is perfect, which apparently made him eligible to appear on several japanese TV shows, where he goes by the nickname Zero (セロ), since Cyril is probably the least pronounceable name ever. His image is somewhere between David Blaine and David Copperfield, and he does a good job of adapting his tricks to the japanese audience by conjuring up food out of thin air. (I don't know about you, but at least I get the impression that japanese TV shows are always about food.)

Luckily for you, dear reader, a lot of his tricks are available for easy watching on YouTube, a service you might recognize since I use it myself to post videos here. The following is a list of clips I found, from which I've excluded one or two repetitions of the same trick.

• Making coins
• Tea ceremony
• Ice coffee
• Cafe latte
• Hamburger trick (you may have seen this one; I saw this and the following one quite a while ago, before I knew who he was)
• Masquerading as old man
• Cards, kisses and candy
• More candy
• Bird and fruit in Chinatown
• Chewing gum and torn-up yen bill
• Card in water
• Ambitious card with a great twist
• Flying yen bill
• Levitating girl
• Bottle cap
• Glass table
• Card and window 1 (subway)
• Card and window 2 (cafe)
• Card and window 3 (under water)
• Card prediction
• Darts prediction (with Yaguchi Mari, yay!)
• Rubberband (old trick)
• Supermarket (he's made of money!)
• Matches and coin
• Bungee jump
• Shadows and chopsticks
• Shadows, cards and food (w/ japanese celebrity)
• Knife and cards (w/ japanese TV drama cast)
• Broken watch (w/ japanese comic duo)
• Popcorn (w/ korean star)
• Disappearing/reappearing stuff (w/ japanese actor)
• Will do magic for food
• Prediction with a twist
• Disappearing act

That's all folks!

Sweden

I recently learned from a japanese friend that an old name for Japan is 瑞穂の国, which means "The Land of Abundant Rice." It's a nice name, and easier to follow than the kanji for U.S.A., 米国, which literally means "rice country." (Since rice was synonymous with currency when Japan came into contact with the US, the name actually means "rich country.")

Anyway, the archaic name for Japan struck me as very interesting, since I recognized the first kanji, 瑞, which is one of the chinese characters that represent Sweden: 瑞典. These characters were probably chosen by people in Hong Kong for their phonetic value, because when read in the Cantonese dialect they sound kind of like the English word "Sweden" (or so I've heard, I only know a few words of Cantonese). So now that I knew that the first kanji can be interpreted as "abundant," what could the second one, 典, mean? A quick dictionary check told me "rule, code, law."

Hence, according to its phonetic representation in kanji, Sweden is the Land of Abundant Laws! Extraordinarily, the semantics turned out to be dead-on, as Sweden does indeed suffer from a ridiculous amount of rules and regulations. As Björk once said: "I thought I could organize freedom / How Scandinavian of me"