asakusa samba festival 浅草カーニバル (asakusa, japan)

Posted by timothy sullivan (Tokyo, Japan) on 1 September 2008 in People & Portrait.

...so i've received a few emails asking saying, so i thought Japan was a pretty traditional culture, with low-key people? and quite a few other inquiries regarding the history of the samba festival. accordingly, quick background.

first: japan is---well, an amazing conglomeration of ways of living, ranging from the traditional to, well, the post-modern. i say "conglomeration" because this diffusion is not uniform: you can go to "rural" japan and see people carrying on pretty much as they have as their parents and grandparents have before them, and yet some highschool boys will have rockstar hair, and some girls will be wearing miniskirts at lengths that would make madonna blush. and yet, both sides of the coin seem to be basically tolerated and "normal" in a sense. (but more on cultural observations later on...)

now, the festival: as i understand it, the samba festival (or alternatively and interchangeably, the "asakusa carnival") was the brainchild of one of the taito city mayors, who had developed it as a way of increasing tourism to the asakusa area. the mayor invited the winning group of that year's Rio Carnival to the inaugural festival, held in 1981. people seemed to enjoy it so much that they have held the festival annually on the last saturday in august ever since--and still invite many brasilians to attend/participate.

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