Adventures in Reggae

Have any of you ever been to a reggae festival before? Maybe, but even if you haven’t there’s a certain something you’re kinda programmed to expect. Summons up images of summer-time, marijuana, colorful clothing, slow, sunshine-soaked tunes, Jamaican flags, maybe some weed, dreadlocks, darshy frat-dudes, free love, and uh… well yeah mostly just a lot of doobie smoking. When I hear the word reggae, the image of Bob Marley wearing a grill-full of joints and a wreath of sticky-icky-icky gently wafts across my eyes, a tropically infused score of Jamaican accents and electric guitars filling in the spaces obscured by the smoke. It’s a vision which leaves me feeling relaxed, serene, and strangely hungry. It’s OK, you know, not really something I like feeling (I prefer being nervous, agitated, and hella full at all times), but that’s what reggae is, you know? Why fight it? Don’t worry, be happy and all that.
But in Japan? How could a reggae festival exist without its most important ingredient, its staple crop, its ambassador, its biggest draw, its muse? It’d be like going to a Creed concert with Scott Stapp passed out in front of the microphone instead of awake and singing into it (bad example, Scott Stapp doesn’t give a concert any other way); how can I go see Creed knowing that I won’t be able to hear With Arms Wide Open, and how do reggae fans go to a reggae festival knowing they won’t be able to get high? And they won’t be high, not in this country. Here they have robot dogs that can sniff the merest thought of drugs, and if they smell such a scent upon your mind then you can say hello to a jail cell real quick. I think I read somewhere that it’s a capital offense to know somebody who has seen Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (which I think is surprisingly fair). So obviously, once I heard that there was a reggae festival in the nearby town of Bentenjima, I considered it my obligation as an armchair sociologist to attend.
We were promised massive crowds, live bands, rivers of beer, barbequed meat hanging from the trees and generally just a kicking party, so I was pretty interested to check it all out. Unfortunately, you can’t always believe everything you’re told. We stepped off the train at Bentenjima to a cozy little fishing hamlet being pummeled by the summer sun; it’s a fair-sized town of rivers, dingies, weepy-green willows stitched into the patches of dirt mixed into the patchy concrete streets, and, today, a reggae festival in 95 degree heat. Pretty random, but I’m learning to roll with random.
It was like a twenty-minute walk from the station to the festival, but from looking around I figured that unless there was either a worm hole or a port-key nearby, there was no way we were going to wind up at a kicking party. A tide-pool, maybe, or a whaler’s convention, but not a massive party.
As it turns out, there could have been a massive party there, but there wasn’t. There was a tent. Well, maybe if I were being generous we could say there was a pavilion, but it encompassed about 2% of a field the size of an airport. And live bands? Not quite. There was just a DJ dropping phat beats. Imagine a group of about 200 Japanese people dressed alternately as rainbows or extras from a T-Payne video, and now imagine them grooving out to Brandy, Christina Aguilera, and Shania Twain. All of those things happened. The DJ called out something really bad-ass sounding, the equivalent of “yo, yo, check it!” or something like that, and then proceeded to put on “I Feel Like a Woman.” It was about then that I thought to myself… this is a place in which you can never live. Nonetheless, the weather was great, the scenery colorful, and the company not half bad, so I count it a good day.