The United Japanese Society is scheduled to celebrate Tsukimi No Kai, the annual moon-viewing festival, with a dinner, haiku contest, moon-viewing, cultural demonstrations, bon dance and live entertainment.
The Oct. 11 event, which traditionally brings families and friends together to celebrate the harvest moon, will be held in person for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The society has hosted Tsukimi No Kai events for the past several decades, although the festival is not commonly celebrated in Hawaii, said Casey Miyashiro, a board member. The event is an opportunity for people to celebrate and learn more about the occasion, he said.
The holiday closely resembles the Chinese moon festival, and also goes by the names Otsukimi or Jugoya. It is traditionally celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth month, when the moon is thought to be the brightest and the most beautiful.
It’s said that the holiday came to Japan from China during the Heian period (A.D. 794 to 1185), where it was commonly celebrated by aristocrats who would gather under the light of the harvest moon, enjoy food, drink sake and recite poems. Many of these traditions are still included in modern-day celebrations.
The opening ceremony will be performed by a Shinto priest, where he will make “offerings of seasonal vegetables as well as tsukimi dango, which are like little mochi balls,” Miyashiro said.
Tsukimi dango will also be available for attendees to enjoy at the Oct. 11 event. The dango are often shaped and colored to resemble the moon — a common snack eaten to celebrate the occasion.
Entertainment also will include taiko and Japanese nihon-buyo performances, the latter of which is a traditional Japanese dance that evolved from Kabuki theater.
A bon dance will also be held at the event, which will begin after dinner. There, bon dance performers from Iwakuni Odori Aiko Kai, and singer and shamisen player Anju Madoka will be featured.
Miyashiro expects over a hundred guests to attend the upcoming event, which will run from 6 to 9 p.m. Dinner will be included with the purchase of a ticket, and the menu will be created by Jon Matsubara from Feast restaurant in Manoa.
Tickets can be purchased online at bit.ly/3Cj4TxG through today.
Linsey Dower covers ethnic and cultural affairs and is a corps member of Report for America, a national service organization that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Iwakuni Odori Aiko Kai as Okinawan dance performers.
