Hiroshima-ken hosted another outdoor music festivals. These seem to be where all the cool Japanese people hang out. I traveled up there with my friend's Emily and Cathy and Cathy's friend Yuki. Yuki works at Chi'iori, and I soon realized that I had met him when I went there in January.

I really didn't take a lot of good photos at this show. The main stage is worth taking a look at though, with all it's trance weirdos. We also get Mana and Rich playing didge on the second stage. Rich put together a pretty cool cd of electronic stuff and used the didge to add a bass-line. As Derek has said, "The didge isn't bad if you can't play a real instrument."

One of the highlights of the show was Rich's "sack dance" which was performed for a very limited audience.

Rich continued the clownish antics by eating this cicada shell that Mike discovered.

If I'm going to try to keep up this photojournalism format, I really need to start taking some photos. The coolest part of the weekend (for me) is entirely absent from this narrative. Diane (from Hiroshima) and I biked from the festival down to the beach. It was a great bike ride and a good chance to talk to Diane one-on-one and really get to know her. Amazing woman. Sadly heading back to Britain now.

This weekend was interesting in that it was the most time I've spent around Japanese people without speaking Japanese. All the Japanese people we were with spoke perfect English, so I felt a bit foolish using my broken Japanese. It turns out that Mahibon actually lived in Tucson for 7 years. He stayed with a Mexican family part of the time and has a bit of a Mexican accent in his English. There's nothing like hearing a Japanese guy say "pinche".

It was also cool to see all the Hiroshima folk again. They've got a cool little group there. Some of the Hiroshima people seem to think the Ehime gang is pretty cool too, so maybe it's just a matter of the people at these festivals being a self-selecting group.