Monday, 8 October 2012

A typhoon & a concert



It's typhoon season here. It's seems like today has been the first fine day for ... ages.  It's hard to remember that a couple of weeks ago I was thinking of finding out where the fire hydrant water supply could be accessed so I could water the azaleas in the neighbourhood which were giving up the ghost with the relentless  hot, dry summer.

Last weekend there was a typhoon forecast, Hiro received free tickets to a Kesennuma concert in Hamamatsucho and were umming and ahhing about whether to go.  I figured we should, typhoon are never very serious in Tokyo, the concert was starring Ikumi Kumagai, whom we had met through mutual friends in Akita, and I wanted to support  Kesennuma was hit badly by the tsunami, ( and is just south of Rikuzen Takada where I spent time last year).

So despite the typhoon, we went.  I assumed was a fund raising concert with Ikumi Kumagai,  as the main draw card,but in fact was a documentary screening / chat about the earthquake / Ikumui Kumagai concert. The chat session was a group  of classmates from Kessenuma,  One was the MC, one Ikumi Kumagai,  one was the silver medalist fencer from the London Olympics and one was a representative of the Japan national rugby team.  Amazing to have 4 such high achieving classmates in a small country town...

 I knew Ikumi was relatively well known, but was quite surprised at how good she is.....
(see below)  She mostly writes her own music. As far as I know this is one she wrote for some NHK drama.


The trains were all on reduced services.  The map below shows the whole system yellow - it's not meant to be....   Despite the disruption, it was easy to get home.  I guess most people stayed in or went home early.



2 comments:

Rurousha said...

It's finally beginning to feel like autumn, too, in other words ... I'm actually wearing long sleeves as I'm typing this.

I don't know who Ikumi Kumagai is (but nice music), but that Olympics fencer? You mean Yuki Ota? He's rather handsome. ^^ Lucky girl!

Cecilia said...

I had to check... sports stars, much like music stars tend to blend into one for me... hmmm what a terrible confession... It was Kenta Chida who was in the team fencing. He casually pulled it out of his back pocket like it was a packet of chewing gum...

The rugby player was Kensuke Hatakeyama. Chida was in Germany training at the time of the earthquake and it took him the best part of a week to make contact. It must have been very very hard.

And yes, bring on the jackets...