Summer and fall festivals were always welcome when I was a child — as a surefire cure to break up the monotony of the year.
And while my favorites also heralded (sigh!) the beginning of the annual school year, I did not begrudge their arrival!
Dad introduced my brother and I to the Seattle Bon Odori. It’s a Buddhist festival that was brought over with Japanese immigrants when they came to the United States, and is still celebrated all over Japan to this day.
Although his family wasn’t Buddhist, Dad had a particular fondness for the Seattle Bon Odori, as he would tell us with regularity. His childhood memory, while not reliable in other matters, could vividly recall the lights, sounds, colors and crowds due to the fact it was a festival in the neighborhood of his youth. The first year of its existence, in 1932, took place directly across from the two-story rental house on 10th Avenue S. and Main where he had been born.
We didn’t go to the Bon Odori every year. But it was a frequent enough activity (until we moved to the Eastside when I was in seventh grade), along with the Seafair Chinatown/International District Parade and the Western Washington State Fair in Puyallup, to qualify as a family tradition.
Kids like parades. When I was in grade school, I enjoyed them all. My favorite was the Seafair Chinatown/International District Parade. This event combined the annual appearance of a handful of my favorite parade entrants such as the Chinese Community Girls Drill Team and one representing Filipino-American Youth Activities, with an audience heavier in the ratio of persons of Asian-American ancestry — one of the very few public events aside from the Bon Odori where a good many people would look like me.
Thankfully, the public school on Beacon Hill where I attended was considerably integrated for its day while still having a Caucasian majority. My classmates came from families of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Italian, Hawaiian, German, Scotch, Irish, English and African American heritage, just to name a few.
I knew this because I had asked them after repeatedly fending off questions from the self-appointed inquisitors of my own age in every grade I attended, with the exception of kindergarten, as to if I was Chinese or Japanese.
By fourth or fifth grade, I was as sick of that question as someone like actor William Shatner, who starred in “Star Trek,” may be of fans asking him for the billionth time: Where are the bathrooms on the Starship Enterprise?
Rounding out the calendar was the Puyallup Fair — an annual ritual in the lives of every kid on my South Seattle neighborhood block. My fair experience was slightly different from those of my playmates. Dad would regale us again with stories of how he, his parents and siblings lived on the fairgrounds during World War II after being rounded up with 120,000 other Americans of Japanese ancestry — and prior to, being shipped by train to the government internment camps in Minidoka, Idaho, where they would stay during of the war.
Memories of my family’s festival traditions came back when my husband and I attended the bi-annual Finnish-American Folk Festival (FAFF) from July 25-27 in Naselle, Wash. Founders including Susan E. Holway,
a talented writer and playwright I met last April while attending the Washington State Cultural Congress in Leavenworth, have successfully put together all of the audience’s favorite elements for 26 years.
As with many of the FAFFs in recent years, the events of last month’s ethnic Caucasian festivities all took place under a single roof — that of the local junior and senior high. In addition to cultural programming, vendors, a run and field events, food items featured (I assume) a number of Finnish favorites such as open face sandwiches, squeaky cheese, prune tarts, Swedish sour cream coffee cake, beef and chicken teriyaki.
You read it right, and the result is that now I feel a bit of kinship with the Finnish — at least those in Naselle, Wash.
All I need next is to find out where they got their recipe.
Federal Way resident Mizu Sugimura: mizu.s@comcast.net.
