Santa Rosa’s Matsuri Festival brings Japanese art and culture to life

Fans of all things Japanese - from art to food to music and dance - will be able to find their own bit of the ancient island nation in Santa Rosa’s Juilliard Park this weekend, at the daylong Masturi Japanese Arts Festival.

“Matsuri means ‘festival’ in Japanese,” said longtime Sonoma County musician Elliot Kallen, one of the organizers of this year’s ninth annual event, said with a bemused smile. “So it’s sort of redundant when we say, ‘Matsuri Japanese Festival.’”

Even if the festival title repeats itself, it’s admirably effective, letting you know in two languages that you’ll get a chance to immerse yourself in Japanese culture.

The weekend of cultural enlightenment unofficially starts Saturday night with a concert by Kallen and Riley Lee featuring music for the shakuhachi, or Japanese flute, at Santa Rosa’s Church of One Tree.

“The night before Matsuri every year, we do this,” Kallen said of the concert held in the church built in 1873 from a single 275-foot tall redwood tree mined in Guerneville.

The festival itself opens at 11 a.m. Sunday morning at Juilliard for a full day of Japanese arts and culture that includes formal tea ceremonies, traditional music and folk dancing, a judo demonstration and, of course, Taiko drumming.

“We’re very much sticking to this idea of traditional culture, as opposed to some of the modern manifestations of Japanese arts, such as anime and pop culture. We don’t get into that much at all. In fact, we try to avoid it,” Kallen said. “So the crafts and demonstrations you see are all try to promote traditional arts.”

Originally introduced as a smaller event in 2009, the festival expanded dramatically in 2011, dedicating itself to raising relief funds for victims of the Japan earthquake and tsunami that year. Organizers were surprised and delighted by a turnout of well over a thousand people, and since then, popular support for Matsuri has been strong.

“There’s a lot of excitement when you get Taiko drummers onstage. It’s very engaging,” he said. “A lot of the folk dancers that you’ll see actually go out into the audience, and one way or another, get people involved, so you’ll see audience dancing around in a circle. It’s infectious.”

The original instigators of the festival were Mario and Liz Uribe, lifelong devotees of Japanese culture, who started with a modest display of Japanese pottery behind Mario’s Backstreet Gallery and art studio near Juilliard Park, and decided to follow that with a small festival.

“I think that Japanese culture has had some impact on Sonoma County for a long time,” Mario Uribe said. “There have been Japanese here for well over a 100 years and there is a large Japanese population, but their culture has been somewhat hidden, particularly during World War II. They kept to themselves. They wanted their children to assimilate.”

“I know that there’s a large Japanese arts festival in San Francisco, but that’s pretty commercial. We wanted to keep it authentic,” he added.

Henry Kaku, current president of the Matsuri event’s board of directors and one of its early organizers, is a third-generation Japanese-American and a Sonoma County resident since 1985. From his point of view, the festival offers a window into a sector of the community that is sometimes overlooked.

“We have a deep-rooted history in Sonoma County, but our culture is less-known here than in the greater Bay Area,” Kaku said. “This festival brings out the diversity in our community.”

A good time may be guaranteed by festival’s organizers, but there’s a deliberate educational goal behind the event’s programming.

“It’s one way to find an entrance into Japanese culture that otherwise, some people find off-putting occasionally, things like the tea ceremony,” Kallen said. “To experience it yourself is the important thing, and that’s what we’re all about.”

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 707-521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts.