Now that the tsuyu season has ended and the thick clouds have been blown away from Japan’s skies, summer has finally come. Summer is a time for long vacations with friends and families, as students get their longest holiday of the year and workers get their one-week O-bon holidays.
Office workers have five days off during the middle of August to celebrate o-bon, a week when Japanese people celebrate the dead. With everyone off school and work, families take vacations overseas, or to the parent’s hometowns to see relatives. Some people head to the northern area of Japan, in order to escape the heat.
Though elementary to high school students have a one-month long holiday, they also have a lot of homework, such as science projects and book reports to do over the summer. Most students tend to procrastinate to the point where they cannot finish their homework by the end of the holidays, and parents have to help out in some sort of way.
Festivals are a popular event for the summer. Here is a link to my post on Japanese summer festivals. Big fireworks are an essential part of Japanese summers, but small hand-held fireworks that you can do in your backyard are also extremely popular. During the summer, you can find these fireworks at most convenience stores and supermarkets.
Firework festival
Summer in Japan is hot and humid, so people cool down by eating cold and nutritious food, such as cold noodles (somen or soba), snow cones (kakigori), watermelon, and pickled vegetables (otsukemono). A popular outdoor activity that kids do, is watermelon-splitting. Like a piñata, one child puts a blindfold on and with a stick, hits the watermelon placed on the groud. Children take turns in doing this, and whoever splits the watermelon wins. However, this is not easy, because before they can start hitting the watermelon, they have to turn 10 times on the spot. Dizzy and blindfolded, the child listens to the directions that the other children shout out and tries to find the watermelon. After someone has split the watermelon, the children eat the fruit together.
Get Social