The Sakura Festival has been celebrating Japanese culture in Tuscaloosa for thirty eight years. This year, the event will take place Saturday, March 23 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Warner Transportation Museum located downtown on Jack Warner Parkway. Each year, people come together to celebrate bringing together two different cultures.
From the 80’s to early 2000’s, Tuscaloosa had a large Japanese presence mostly due to the city being home to Japanese video tape company, JVC. That relationship grew to include the community’s sister city of Narashino.
Kimberly Sennett works for The University of Alabama’s Capstone international Center. She said the university used to have a “Japan program” that would host Saturday school for kids of Japanese families working for JVC in Tuscaloosa, since children in Japan attend school on Saturdays. She also said those families were a huge part in the festival.
“The festival connects Tuscaloosa with Japanese culture, since there was such a large community of Japanese people here in town back in the 80s, 90s and the beginning of the 2000s,” said Sennett.
A University of Alabama release said…
“The spring celebration of Sakura, or cherry blossoms, are meant to remind us of the value of each moment, while the return of spring awakens us to fresh possibilities in life.”
This year’s theme for the Sakura Festival is “preserve,” meaning to preserve the bonds and relationship between Tuscaloosa and its Japanese culture as well as its sister city, Narashino, which began as a small agricultural village, but is now a thriving urban society just outside Tokyo with a population of over 170,000.
According to Facts.net, Narashino is known for its cherry blossoms in the spring. The city donated cherry blossom trees to Tuscaloosa that now grow and bloom downtown. The city is also home to traditional Japanese festivals, which made way for the local Sakura Festival.
“For the City of Tuscaloosa, for the people that know about it, I think it's really just continuing on this tradition and trying to share the two cultures with each other so that everybody has an opportunity to learn about someone else's culture,” said Sennett. “I think it makes the people in town that participate happy that they can share what they know about Japan with people who may not ever even consider going to any kind of Japanese festival.”
The festival will include traditional Japanese festival activities, Japanese papermaking, activities for kids and traditional Japanese performances. For the second year, the Sakura Festival will also include a cosplay contest. Participants in the contest must arrive no later than 1 p.m. and register at the event.
