While the student organization J-Net is separate from the Cosmo Club (although the Japanese students did host an extremely successful coffee hour on March 13), the organizations share many of the same goals. Daniel Fong is a junior in Aerospace Engineering, reporting from behind the scenes on the recent “Japan Night” held at Foellinger Auditorium.
Japan Intercultural Network (J-Net) is an organization that is centered on the culture of Japan. Some members are from Japan and studying here in America, some are Japanese students here at U. of I., and some simply have an interest in the Japanese culture. The important idea is that everyone involved is interested in Japan in some way, and the events J-Net holds such as cooking lessons and movie nights all revolve around some part of the Japanese culture.
On Sunday, April 13, 2008, J-Net held an event that it had never held before: Japan Night. The premise of this was fairly simple; for the first half of the event, have a festival (known in Japan as a Matsuri), and for the other half, have a cultural show with the main attraction being a taiko group (Japanese Drums). However an event of this magnitude requires an extremely large amount of time, work, and effort in order to coordinate correctly.
One of the fundamentals of planning an event like this is funding. There is the cost of renting out Foellinger Auditorium (where the event was held), bringing the taiko group out here, food, equipment, and a lot of other related miscellaneous items. Needless to say this adds up to quite a big budget. We started planning this around the beginning of the semester for fundraising events, asking companies to fund this in exchange for advertising spots, etc.
Another issue was that nobody in this generation of J-Net had any experience with this kind of event. A somewhat similar event was held around 4 years ago and drew around 1,200 people, but particular differences were that this only consisted of a show without a festival and the then president of J-Net pretty much did all the work (so I've been told). So nobody among us had worked on an event like this before or been to one, so that alone posed quite a challenge.
There were three main groups to the planning of this event: Matsuri, Show, and Advertising. The Matsuri group was in charge of the festival. They took care of planning booths, what kind of food to offer, and merchandising. The Show group planned acts for the show that would take place before the taiko group came on. Then there was the Advertising group which helped make sure as many people as possible came to this event, as well as raising funds for this event.
A matsuri is a traditional Japanese festival. Booths are set up and traditionally serve food or have games. We had four different kinds of Japanese food at our booths: okonomiyaki (sort of like a Japanese pancake), dango (rice flour dumplings), yakitori (skewered chicken) and yakisoba (fried noodles). This involved a ton of work setting up and preparing food (some of us spent about ten hours the day before Japan Night cooking food). Because of the cold weather and threat of rain on that Sunday we had to reconfigure the set up of the matsuri a little bit to put them under tents but given our circumstances we managed quite well, even though it would have definitely been better if the weather had been nicer.
As for the show, we had about 30-45 minutes worth of acts before the taiko group came on stage. The opening act was a dance called “Ouendan,” which literally means “cheering squad.” This is a dance traditionally performed at sporting events and is meant to lift moods and spirits. After that the show consisted of a few live music performances, one in particular being a koto performance (a Japanese stringed instrument), played by Anne Prescott, who is a faculty member here in the EALC department. We also had a few skits showing a few shades of Japanese culture in a comedic fashion. After all the music performances, skits, and dances was the taiko group. They performed for close to 45 minutes, which may have been a little long but it was great to watch nonetheless. (More information on the Japanese terms mentioned here can be found on the Internet's most trustworthy encyclopedia!)
So in the end after months of hard work and planning Japan Night finally came to an end. Given our circumstances I think we did a pretty good job. We probably would have had a much larger audience if the weather was as nice on Sunday as has been lately, but unfortunately there is not too much we can do about it. It was still a great experience and a lot of fun. Will there be another one next year? Perhaps, but after all the hard work we put into this I think everyone deserves a nice long break.