The Japanese Culture Club presented their annual Japan Knight in the College Union Ballroom on Saturday Nov. 8. The event served to explore various aspects of Japanese culture through student performances, traditional music, dance and cuisine. (Udeshi Seneviratne/Photo editor
From a dinner party to a fashion show to live music to a series of interlocked skits, Japanese Culture Club’s annual Japan Knight transformed into different experiences for guests throughout the evening on Nov. 17 in the College Union Ballroom.
The night began as attendees began to filter into the ballroom and sit at their respective tables. Students across different backgrounds mingled with each other as they waited for the event to begin.
The night’s festivities started as the band broke out their instruments and started playing different songs accompanied by different vocalists.
JCC President senior Giovanna Giua spoke on how the club tried to feature performances that showcased Japanese popular culture.
“With the singing … we want to appreciate pop culture, traditional music, understanding where it comes from, this is what our songs are like,” Giua said. “It’s just a fun way of appreciating it and a fun way of expressing everything to people who might know things as well.”
For some attendees, the best part of the night came as the organizers unveiled the food options. In conjunction with Campus Auxiliary Services, JCC provided a menu with options that ranged from chicken teriyaki to miyabi soup to niratama. The club specifically tried to provide options that would appeal to attendees with different dietary restrictions, according to Giua.
After the attendees had their fill of the food, JCC introduced its main event—a multi-part skit called Yakusoku, which is Japanese for “promise.” The skit followed a young man in Japan who tries to find himself in the wake of his parents’ deaths but finds the Yakuza instead. Throughout the skits, the audience witnessed his—as well as his friends’—trials and tribulations.
The play’s plot doesn’t pull many punches, reflecting many people’s unfortunate experiences with the Japanese mafia. Giua, who co-wrote and co-directed the skits, felt that it was important to depict some of the bleaker aspects of Japanese culture and life.
“With every skit, we always try to figure out some concept about Japanese society that’s not really addressed,” Giua said. “Last year we talked about suicide and this year we talked about the Yakuza. We wanted it to be dramatized, but we didn’t want it to be unrealistic, so we took time and research to understand the different issues.”
Between some of the scenes in the skit, club members came on stage to exhibit more variety performances. One group of members put on a fashion show, demonstrating different Japanese clothing styles from traditional to modern and from casual to formal.
The directors also choreographed different dance sequences and interspersed them throughout the skits. Like the other aspects, these dances showed the audience a sampling of different styles.
Overall, JCC’s mission is to educate and entertain students of all different backgrounds through Japanese culture, according to Giua.
“JCC’s goal as a club is to provide an environment where Japanese kids can come and feel welcome or learn more about their culture, where American Japanese people can also come and meet other people who are interested in Japanese culture and where non-Japanese or non-Asian kids can also come in to learn about the culture and language,” Giua said. “We all have this thing in common, that we love Japanese culture, that we want to learn more about it and appreciate it.”