Town-Jack!

“Town-jack” is one of the exciting ad promotions. I like it.

Town-jack is a way of promotion that focuses on one area where targeted people supposed to fragrant and an advertiser put in a large amount of ads such as posters, billboards, digital signage. It’s really exciting to see walls, pillars and concourses being covered by the same series of posers here and there.

Town-jack promotion is effective in terms of drawing people’s attention and making people talk about it as the first step of word-of-mouth-marketing.

I like to be at the site to watch people so that I know how they react to the promotion. It’s a kind of simple research. What kind of people look at the posters? How many people stop at the posters? And what kind of conversation do they carry before them? It’s quite fun.

In here, the promotion seems to mix into one with the scenery of town and people. I hope it touches people’s mind in a good way.

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Can you write down cursive?

As we know, IT devices totally have changed our writing style but I didn’t know it did to this extent. I’m surprised to know that many young people both in the US and Japan don’t know how to write cursive!

However, I have to confess that I didn’t quite remember how to write down cursive of D, G, H because I have never written them for many years. Well, I might not be qualified to say something about younger generations.

The other day, when I was reorganizing my drawer, I found some old writing implements that I almost had forgotten about owning. They were a fountain pen, a mechanical pencil and a ballpoint pen. They looked a bit rusty but still useable.

I brought them to Kinpendo to have them repaired and adjusted. Kinpendo is a kind of specialty store that specializes in high quality writing implements and it has a lot of good customers such as authors and journalists.

The master said that my pens were very rare items nowadays and it would be nice for me to keep using them. I might come up with some good phrases with these pens like great authors.

Now they are on my desk but I still haven’t had any chance to use them.

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Men who became a god in Chichibu Night Festival

I went to Chichibu to see the Chichibu night festival last week.

The festival is considered to be one of Japan’s three greatest float festivals and it has about 250,000 visitors every year.

Six floats decorated with wood carving, embroidered tapestry and lanterns are being pulled around the town by local residents from morning till late at night.

The excitement reaches its peak at night when floats climb up the Dango-zaka, a very steep slope, one after another. In addition to this, the fireworks display enhances the atmosphere.

It was so beautiful that it made you forget the cold weather in December.

What interested me most in this festival was the men who are standing on the front part of the floats, continuously shouting “hoo-ryai.” They are inclining over to the drawers, stretching out their hands widely or shaking their lanterns from side to side as if they were saying “come on!” or agitating people to excite.

“They are called Hayashi-te, or hurrayer.” An old man from a neighborhood explained to me. “And you know, they are considered to be gods as long as they are on the float.”

Wow, that sounds very interesting.

According to what this old man told me, “Hayashi-te”s need to have a purification ceremony before the festival. They take off their clothes and bathe in cold water to purify them. And once they step upon the float, they are respected as gods during this 2-days festival.

“Hayashi-te”s are selected strictly according to their behavior and contribution to their community. For local people, it’s a hero of the festival and a very honorable once-in-a-life-time role.

Here in Chichibu, gods seems to summon people to this festival very much.

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