We went to a day about the Heian Era last week. This period in Japanese history from 794 to 1185 was a time of peace and prosperity. The arts and religion flourished, so did fashion. The first novel, called the Tale of Genji, was written during this period by a woman named Murasaki Shikibu. Murasaki is pretty famous in our town because she lived here for a year. oh, by the way, Takefu is a really old town, the name and community have been in existence for about 1500 years. Pretty hard to believe. And the name is unusual, we're the only city named Takefu in all of Japan. However all of that changed a couple of months ago when the town merged with anohter town in an attempt to decrease civil government and be more efficient. Now our town is called Echizen.
All that said, the Takefu Rotary Club sponsored this event where we got to wear 12 layered kimonos. The court ladies at the time were very focused on fashion and matching colors so much that they would wear 12 kimonos to make their outfits look good. Now, you may be thinking, Peaches, how on earth did you manage to move in so many kimonos? Well the truth is, I don't know. I only wore pieces of fabric sewn together to look like there were many more layers than there were. However the top two kimonos were really heavy.
Here's some guys playing traditional musical instruments. This one is called the shoo.
After wearing the kimonos and listening to some Heian music we went to a really fancy restaurant to eat lunch. They served us tons of food! We all got to share a sampling of Heian food. A lot of it was similar to the foods we have now, but a slight variation and much more costly ingredients. Here's a picture of the layout. We each had our own little table to sit at. They were arragned so that 8 people sat facing each other with individual trays and 2 trays in the middle with the special Heian Era fancy food for us to share.
