Today is Respect of the Aged Day in Japan. It was established as a national holiday in 1966 to recognize and thank the elders in the community for their contributions and celebrate their lives. What do you do to recognize your older family members or neighbors?
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Karen and Osaka in front of the Osaka Restaurant
Today to celebrate my 50th year we drove to Provo and ate at Osaka on Center Street. We use to live less than a mile away but what this place reminds me of most is when I did Christmas windows out of candy for Provo City Arts Council. I did my window in Osaka all but the very first year that I did a window. Mary was always so nice to work with and she always wanted to keep my window up until after Valentines day. By then they were pretty faded and certainly ready to take down. She actually still has the focal point from one of the windows in her lobby. The year our theme was Christmas Around the World I made a life-size Japanese woman in a Kimono covered with sliced jelly belly candy. She has gotten a bit dusty over the years but for the most part she is still in pretty good shape.
Each year we did a window, Mary would give us a gift certificate to her restaurant. And I still had some money left on the last one she gave me. Also one of my fellow puppy raisers has a dog about the same age as Yakira whose name is Osaka. When Karen got Osaka off the truck and thought it would be fun to take our pups to Osaka and have lunch. Well it has almost been a year and we finally got it done. I forgot to take my camera today but I took a couple of shots of Karen and Osaka in front of Osaka with her camera. I’m sure she will share the photo with me then I can post it here. Zodiac was a good boy and resisted playing with Osaka under the table until it was about time to leave.
Yakira ended up having to stay home. She has been given no car travel until Monday as part of dealing with her anxiety during the trip to Denver last week. I’ll have to find a photo of the candy windows I did at Osaka and post them here also. Today is another one of those lovely fall days with blue skies and nice temperatures.
Japan Festival - Salt Lake City
Today we took Trax downtown to the Japan Festival. It was sunny but cool and the festival was very crowded. In 1985 I went to got to Kobe, Japan to play volleyball in the World University Games. We just missed getting a medal by taking 4th place. That was a long time ago and it feels like another lifetime too. There wasn’t much of today’s festival that reminded me of that trip but I’m glad we went.
Yakira and the CCI dog
balloon artist with samurai warrior hat
As we got off Trax about a block from the festival we started to notice the costumes. Some people were dress in traditional Japanese dress. But more common were young people dressed in all kinds of fanciful ways, with cat ears, tails and other kinds of animals. There were a couple of booths about anime so we think that the costumes were from Japanese cartoons. Most of one side of the street were food booths. The other side of the street had booths with merchandise. The most popular items were colorful umbrellas and samurai swords. We saw several dogs including a working dog from CCI (Canine Companions for Independence). The CCI dog was a yellow lab, who showed interest in Yakira but was not distracted by her.They also had an open house at the local Buddhist temple, so we walked around it for a bit.
My favorite thing was a balloon artist. He had this amazing samurai warrior made of balloons on his head. There were also two stages with Japanese entertainment. One on each end of the street. It was too crowded for my comfort so we didn’t stay very long. Yakira didn’t love the crowds but she handled them just fine.
telling family tales 