Electric Pig

This Sunday was the annual One Love Jamaica Festival. Organised partly by the Jamaican embassy, it is one of the many "international" (Thailand, Brazil, the all-encompassing Africa etc), festivals in Tokyo in the late spring/early summer. The Jamaican festival has lives acts, performances by Japanese dancehall queens (including Junko, the Japanese dancer who - astonishingly - beat Jamaican girls at their own game and won the World Dancehall Queen contest), and an ill-conceived Bob Marley song contest. There are stalls selling general "ethnic" tat, the same ones that were selling the same stuff last week, bedecked with Thai flags at the Thai Festival, here again, this time with their Jamaican flags. Most importantly though, there are Jerk Chicken stalls. Ummmmmmm, Jerrrk Chicken...I love me some Jerk Chicken.

This year, Eri and I arrived late, about 5 o'clock. Honestly though, it was pretty amazing that I felt well enough to go at all as I was pretty hung over after the previous night's stag festivities. Unfortunately, (though I didn't let Eri see how annoyed I was), we missed the dancehall queen show, and arrived in the middle of the Marley song contest which we quickly left. Walking through the stalls, we stopped at the hilarious "Speak like a Jamaican" stand, organised by the Jamaican Embassy people. Here, an "authentic" Jamaican was teaching Japanese people how to speak Jamaican. It was brilliant, like a wierd version of one of my lesson's, with all the embarrassment factor of when one of the elderly teachers asks you to teach the kids "something youthful" and ends up greeting you as "blud" for the rest of your time in the school. The Jamaican teacher was shouting out:

"Repeat after me: Wha gwarn?!"

The crowd shout back: "Eeto Huwa guwarnu?"

Brilliant.

The jerk chicken queue though, was long. It took us about an hour to get to the front of the queue where I found, to my horror, that the proper rice and peas had been sold out and replaced with just white rice. Sacrilege. Still the jerk chicken was good. The other that that we really noticed was that in the years we have gone to the Jamaican festival, the crowd has really changed. At first, the crowd was much more of a roots/reggae style crowd, more hippys and lots of smelly hair. Now though, it's become much more dancehall, loads more girls in little tops and (strangely for Japan), better endowed. As ever though, the larger endowment has been followed by a bit more of an aggressive attitude, not quite as nice as it used to be. Still, everything has its price...