English
Otsu Square Dance
Gabriel Orion Crawford University of Chicago Student Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies Stanford Japan Center
The sun is shining, the air is warm, the trees are in full leaf, and the tsuyu rains have not yet come. It is spring and life in Kyoto is good. Recently, however, I have been slipping through the mountains out of Kyoto over to Otsu every Thursday night. There, on the third floor of the Community Hall with windows looking out over Lake Biwa, I join the Lakeside Squares Club: some forty Japanese people who gather to square dance. When I arrive, I change into my dance shoes, which are actually beat-up old dress shoes. At the front of the room, the callers tucks in his blue-and-white Western Shirt, then puts on a small 33 1/3 record of old-timey string music. As couples take the floor to fill out several squares of four couples each, there usually are one or two extra couples. To fill out the last square, the caller picks up the microphone to say in English, "Two more couples. Two more couples," then "One more couples," and finally "Okay, square sets." This last call means to straighten up the sets of four couples and get ready to dance. Then the dance begins. Following the calls from the front of the hall, the eight dancers in each set twirl, glide, and swing past each other like the moving colored pieces in a kaleidoscope. In some of the more complicated dances, a square will become completely tangled up and lost at least once. But even then, the dancers keep smiling and moving to the music, waiting for the inevitable break to the chorus of the dance with "Swing your partner, promenade. Promenade two-by-two, all the way back home." Once back at their home side of the square, each couple is ready to follow again whatever the caller may throw their way. The calls are all in English, or at least they are the same calls used for square dancing in English-speaking countries. I leave it to linguists to determine if " Allemande Thar," "Box-the-Gnat," and "Pass through to an Ocean Wave" are to be considered English of not. Of course, the caller explains new steps in Japanese, but most of the dancers have been at it for enough years that they know most of the steps anyway. I must admit that square dancing, so thoroughly a piece of American culture, seems out of place in Japan. In all honesty, part of the reason I am drawn to square dancing here is that just by being American, I am treated as an instant expert and an essential badge of legitimacy for the club. Without the American context, square dancing in Japan could be seen as a copying of form without substance or meaning. But this would be a mistaken view. The Lakeside Squares Club every Thursday night renews the substance and meaning of the dance. While many of the specific dances are learned from tapes of American callers that circulate through the community, many are also created and adapted by the callers here. Anyway, square dancing is no more odd and out of place in Japan than it is in mainstream American culture. Square dancing is its own form, substance, and meaning that springs forth wherever it is danced. With the Lakeside Squares Club, as with any square dance hall, in the atmosphere of the dance there is no irony, only pure sincerity and joy. There are many reasons why people first come to square dancing (to practice their English listening skills, or to be admired for being American), but the reason they stay is the energy of the dance itself, the kaleidoscope of twirling partners. Such analytical thoughts often roll around my head during the breaks between dances. But then, one of the middle-aged ladies comes up to me to ask, " Shall we dance together?" "Let's dance," I reply. I take my new partner's hand, then together we join a square. "Okay, square sets."