Surprise Ending

Sunday was the 16th annual Yokosuka Navy Base Sakura Festival.  The festival is the once a year opportunity for the Japanese public to come to the base and see the tiny America in their own country and the main attraction is the nuclear powered behemoth parked in the their harbor, the USS George Washington.  I say "their" harbor because Japan officially owns the base and the property, they just lease it to the U.S.

The good deal is that the Japanese government maintains the base in it's entirety; the buildings, the grounds, the facilities, all of it.  In exchange they have a carrier strike force and the U.S. seventh fleet that will pretty much ensure no body messes with Japan.

The festival was wonderful, the feeling was happy and it seemed that the Japanese were enjoying their time on base and happy to be able to interact with the Americans so freely.  The Japanese were enamored by American pizza and hamburgers; people were walking around the festival with three, four, and five boxes of pizza all tethered together.  The highlight of the festival for us was my debut performance with Kengekitai.  We had practiced the Sunday and day before the festival for six straight hours on top of the weeks of practice prior to.  All of this and I still felt unprepared. Marshall and I were the newest and only Americans members.  I did not want to let these people, who had invested so much time and effort to train us, down to have to carry us through the performance. Nakano san and Yoshiki san worked especially hard to prepare the group, I can only image all of the extra work they had to do when everyone else was home nursing sore muscles after a hard practice. The tribute to their instruction and our hard work was that it went off without a hitch.  I think the performance was great.  We had fun, there were no mistakes, and with what we were doing, no one got hurt!  There was a special guest performance by our sensei's professional actors, The Shibazaki Action Project.  They were incredible; all dressed as ninja they put on an acrobatics show, with swords,  that made us question how it was humanly possible.  I think Kengekitai stole the show from all of the other acts performing at the festival.

The finale was at our celebration dinner that night.  The group found out my birthday is Friday.  I was completely surprised with flowers, gifts, singing Japanese waiters and yes, cheesecake!  A wonderful ending to a great day.  I hope you all enjoy the photos I loaded a bunch on the slideshow, Jennifer took them all, and keep your eye out for me, I have been invited to perform in front of an all Japanese audience next month; who knows maybe I'll be in some action film where a American gets isolated in tiny Japanese village, but eventually wins the favor of his captors and becomes samurai.