February 13, 2016 takes the record for the coldest day I’ve experienced at college. Even as someone who generally prefers excessive cold to excessive heat, I’ve come to the conclusion that my tolerance for outdoor activity stops at anything below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Any temperature that requires me to wrap a scarf around my face because the outside air stings my skin is simply too low.
At the end of that particularly frigid Saturday, I was relieved to find myself indoors. I stood outside Tishman Commons, on the ground floor of the campus center, at the far end of a line that stretched down the hall and extended up the stairwell. (I had arrived fifteen minutes early.) At ten after the hour, the line began to move. It wound around to the far end of Tishman through an adjacent common room. The narrow hallway was bedecked with blue lanterns, paper snowflakes, fairy lights, and finally, the name of the event in large bubble letters: Yuki Matsuri.
Yuki Matsuri is Japanese for “winter festival.” I knew this already because Wellesley’s Japan Club had been advertising the event for weeks. My decision to attend was more spur-of-the-moment than anything else. For me, that Saturday was frigid in more ways than one. While friends and classmates of mine were set to spend the long weekend off-campus or with significant others, I was dateless and had slated for Valentine’s Day a long stint in the library with my textbooks. Like me, the crowd must have been drawn in by the cold.
Standing in line, longing for the pile of blankets in which I would bury myself later that night, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea of a winter festival. Winter doesn’t generally have much appeal for me. Beyond the novelty of the first snow—and, by extension, the first snow days—winter is something to be endured, something we have to survive in order to appreciate spring. I wasn’t sure what to expect of Yuki Matsuri because I didn’t know what there was to celebrate. Then again, who was I to make assumptions? I can’t claim to have any strong understanding of Japanese culture, and I don’t have any real experience being part of a group on campus analogous to Japan Club. I’ve consistently found myself more of a spectator, and less of an active participant, in my own cultural heritage.
I showed my student ID to the two organizers at the festival entrance and was ushered inside. Immediately, I was struck by the scale of the event. The accordion wall between Tishman and the common room had been folded out of the way, and the space was taken up by two long rows of tables arranged end-to-end, laden with buffet-style platters of food. Of course. Free food: the easiest way to draw a crowd. Volunteers in light blue T-shirts served bite-sized pieces of each dish: one piece of sushi, one piece of mochi, a couple of pieces of edamame, a chunk of fried tofu.
Tishman itself was arranged so that most of the floor space was clear, except for a small stage and the booths lining the edges of the room. I claimed a seat on the floor among the already-growing crowd, and marked it with my backpack. Soon it would be difficult to walk back and forth to my spot without tiptoeing around other people.
While I waited for the festival’s performances to start, I wandered from booth to booth. Food was available at over half of them—which more than made up for the tiny buffet servings. I tried kakigori (shaved ice with syrup, condensed milk, and red bean paste), a frozen chocolate-covered banana (apparently this is actually a thing in Japan), and okonomiyaki, a savory pancake made with shredded cabbage and a strip of bacon. While a quick Google search told me not all of these are necessarily winter festival foods—shaved ice seems to be more of a summertime thing—they were all delicious. I also visited booths where volunteers were guiding visitors in making paper crafts. I painted a phrase—admittedly in Chinese and not Japanese, one I’d recently learned in my Chinese class—on a piece of calligraphy paper. I spent a pleasant ten minutes learning how to make an origami turtle.
At each booth I visited, I asked when planning had started for Yuki Matsuri. I found out Japan Club had been recruiting people to work the festival since December. This is one of the most striking aspects of the event: it is largely volunteer-run. Many different groups have to coordinate. The performances alone featured music from Wellesley’s taiko drum ensemble, dances by Wellesley’s and Tufts’ Japan Clubs, and songs from a Japanese music choir, which—I later found out—was also entirely composed of volunteers. And these were just the performances from the first part of the festival. At the halfway mark, overwhelmed by the size of the crowd, I made my way back to my dorm.
If I’m being honest with myself, the particular significance of most of the aspects of Yuki Matsuri—the dances, the crafts, the food—were lost on me. I did not come away with a greater cultural understanding. To achieve that, I think it would have taken a lot more time and effort than it did to show up at the campus center on a cold Saturday night. But I didn’t leave hungry. And I brought some pieces of the festival home with me. A tiny origami turtle now sits on my bookshelf. The calligraphy page I painted—a symbol of my own accomplishments, if not of my understanding of Japan—hangs on the wall next to my desk. I came away from the festival energized by the dances and inspired by the fierce taiko drumming.
Winter is a low-energy season, and February is a hard month. It’s the coldest time of the year, the month when students drag themselves back from winter break to the stress of their academic lives. And while Americans have customs that are particular to winter—drinking tea curled up indoors by a roaring fire, engaging in the odd snowball fight—we really don’t celebrate winter just for the sake of it. At least, not on the same scale as Yuki Matsuri. I can’t say I understand every aspect of the festival, but what I can say is that it takes one of the most difficult times of the year and gives everyone something fun to do, something energizing. We need things like that. More than we realize.
