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International Man Of Matsuri

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Tokyo In The Now

Tokyo In The Now

You could just feel the energy of the festival

Interview by Michael Kanert

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Sanja Matsuri

© Y.Shimizu/© JNTO

The Japan Festival Canada, held annually in Mississauga, is North America’s largest celebration of Japanese culture. We spoke to Khaled Iwamura, who has been the event’s MC since its first year, to learn more about the spirit of Japanese festivals and find out what makes Japan Festival Canada such a special occasion.

“I'm half Japanese, half Egyptian, born in Montreal and now a proud resident of Mississauga. And I was super-excited, because I was like, ‘A Japanese festival is coming to my city.’ So of course I wanted to be involved.”

The year was 2016, and Khaled Iwamura was speaking to Terry Wakasa, organizer of Japan Festival Canada. This would be the festival’s inaugural year, and Iwamura had signed on to be its master of ceremonies.

A ubiquitous Mississauga media presence, Iwamura is the founder of insauga, the largest media company in the city. Combined with offshoot companies inbrampton and inhalton, his QuickBite News network boasts some 3.5 million monthly pageviews, with 1.2 million unique users centred on the western flank of the Greater Toronto Area. “When we put out an article about a Japanese festival coming to Mississauga, it blew up,” Iwamura

says. “It got read about 130,000 times.” While those are impressive numbers in a city of 800,000, Iwamura recalls the moment of tension when, at 11 a.m. that first Sunday in July, he and Wakasa stood onstage at Celebration Square wondering how many people would actually show up.

Based on readership numbers, Iwamura predicted 15,000 to 25,000 attendees. He was only half off: in the end, some 40,000 people arrived, making Japan Festival Canada the biggest one-day culture event in Mississauga history. A year later, the second event drew 70,000 people over two days. Even in the rain, the third event attracted 80,000 attendees, who were regaled with modern and traditional music, dance, food, sake, martial arts and more.

Iwamura’s path to master of matsuri—the Japanese word for festival—might be traced back to the Toronto International Caravan, a culture festival that was held annually from 1969 to 2004, where he fell in love with Japanese taiko drums. “They moved me because you could feel the percussion—you could feel it in your soul,” he says, clenching his fingers for emphasis. He signed up for lessons with the late taiko performer Chris Kano, then, six months later, joined Kano’s performance troupe, called Yakudo. The next 15 years saw Iwamura performing at clubs and cultural events from Toronto to Hong Kong.

©Wil Yeung

Ironically, he found himself performing taiko in Cairo before he even had a chance to visit Tokyo. The experience laid the foundation for Iwamura’s ease in the spotlight. “There's no way I would have been able to get up there with a mic and talk to the crowd if I didn't drum in front of thousands of people,” he says.

But it wasn’t until 2016 that Iwamura made his first pilgrimage to Tokyo. “We stayed in Shinjuku, and I could walk for hours and just be in awe,” he recalls. In the two years since, he’s already returned five times. “It grows every single time, because you realize that you haven't even scratched the surface of Japan.”

Iwamura timed his most recent trip to coincide with the Sanja Matsuri, one of the Three Great Festivals of Tokyo. “I didn't expect the sheer madness,” he says. “Whenever a shrine comes by, literally everybody—let's just say, like, 20,000 people—flock to it.”

The centrepiece of the festival is a trio of portable shrines, or mikoshi, that are carried through the streets of Asakusa, drawing some 2 million people to the area each year. “It's like the whole town, the whole area, the whole neighbourhood gets involved: everything’s closed outside of maybe the restaurants and stuff like that. You could just feel the energy of the festival.”

How does it compare to Japan Festival Canada? “I mean, the thing is—you’re in Tokyo. You're in the biggest city in the world, at one of the biggest festivals in that city, right? So I don't think it’s fair to compare.”

However, he also believes that’s a matter of purpose: “Sanja Matsuri, it’s for tradition, it’s for the area, it’s for history; where the Japan Festival in Mississauga is about showing off the Japanese culture for the people that don’t know anything about Japanese culture other than sushi and California rolls.”

In multicultural Mississauga, Iwamura takes pride in seeing so many people of different backgrounds come together to find excitement in Japan. “We will look out in the crowd, and maybe there's like 2,000 Japanese people, but there's 18,000 other cultures,” he says. “And that’s what a cultural festival should be.”

©Wil Yeung

Khaled Iwamura is the founder of QuickBite News, a media company comprised of insauga.com, inbrampton.com and inhalton.com. He is also a TEDx Speaker, Tokyo Tourism Spokesperson, TV host/producer, MC and part-time pro wrestler.

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