Bon Odori is traditionally associated with Japan’s summer Obon celebrations, where communities gather through dance, music and collective participation. In Nairobi, the festival creates an encounter between Japanese cultural traditions, the Japanese diaspora and Kenyan and other African communities.
Central Question?
How do diasporic and local communities come together to reimagine tradition and create spaces where cultures meet, adapt, and coexist in contemporary Nairobi?
Culture is rarely static.
When traditions move across borders, they encounter new people, places, languages, histories and ways of life. They may be preserved, adapted, reinterpreted or combined with practices from their new surroundings.
A shared social space.
Japanese music accompanies Bon Odori dancing. Japanese food is prepared and sold alongside local experiences. Performers and audiences from different backgrounds occupy the same space. Cosplayers introduce another layer of contemporary Japanese popular culture, while African communities engage with traditions that originate thousands of kilometres away.
Sub-questions
Observatinal guidance:
- How Japanese cultural traditions are practiced and represented in Nairobi.
- How members of the Japanese diaspora maintain cultural connections while living in Kenya.
- How Kenyan and other African communities participate in and reinterpret Japanese traditions.
- How cultural exchange changes the meaning of tradition outside its original context.
- How food, music, dance and performance create opportunities for intercultural encounter.
- How younger generations engage with Japanese culture through both tradition and contemporary popular culture.
- How festivals create temporary spaces where different cultural identities can coexist.
- What Nairobi reveals about cultural exchange in an increasingly interconnected world.
VISUAL APPROACH
Rather than photographing the spectacular elements of the festival only.The work moves between the large public celebration and the quieter human encounters within it, Combining documentary photography, portraiture, environmental observation and visual ethnography.
PORTRAITS
Members of the Japanese diaspora, Kenyan participants, performers, vendors, organizers, families and young people.
OBSERVATION
People arriving, learning the dance, eating, talking, watching performances and participating in activities.
PERFORMANCE
Bon Odori, music, dance, cosplay and cultural performances.
DETAILS
Food, clothing, objects, decorations, instruments, costumes and other material expressions of culture.
ENCOUNTERS
Moments where people from different cultural backgrounds meet and interact.
PLACE
The physical environment of the festival and its relationship to Nairobi.
Traditions are often imagined as belonging to particular nations or communities. But once people move, migrate, travel and build relationships across borders, traditions begin to travel with them. They become translated. They are taught to new audiences. They acquire new meanings. They coexist with other cultural practices. They become part of new places. This work allows us to ask: Can a tradition remain authentically pure while they travel and cross borders? Perhaps the answer is not either/or. Perhaps cultural identity can be both preserved and transformed.
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