Paddy's Parade, Tokyo

So myself and Saori met up with an Irish friend and his son today at the Tokyo St. Patrick’s Day parade. You’ll note Paddy’s Day comes early to Tokyo! It was my third time at the parade, the last time being back in 2001. Surprisingly, it’s not the only Paddy’s Day parade in Japan. There’s loads of them after springing up all over the country, in places you’ll probably never have heard of like Tsukuba and Ise. And yet when people ask me where I’m from, they’re more likely to confuse it with Iceland or Scotland, than know the capital is Dublin. So despite all these Paddy’s Day parades, it’s still a very minor thing and most people would have very little knowledge of Ireland.

Anyway, as you can see from the pictures most of the people in the parade are in fact Japanese, not Irish. There’s only about a thousand Irish people in Japan and the vast majority of us couldn’t be bothered getting involved! So there’s some people connected with Enterprise Ireland, the embassy, some universities, as well as U2 fans, Irish pubs, etc. Actually in the photo below there’s a group of students from DCU, several of them my students from last year on their year abroad in Japanese universities. If I were sound I would have joined them under the DCU banner! Would’ve been nice to catch up with them actually but didn’t see them after the parade.

Another major presence at the parade were people with Irish dogs! There were a couple of groups with Irish setters and Irish wolfhounds. You’re probably more likely to see a leprechaun than a wolfhound in Ireland though!

After the parade we headed to Yoyogi Park where my friend’s son did his best to drive us to distraction by throwing leaves at us and hitting us with sticks! He’s a cute little fella though so we’ll forgive him. Anyway, while we were at the park we saw the Tokyo Rockabilly Club strut their stuff. These guys are hilarious! They’ve been coming to the park every Sunday for at least 20 years to prance around to all the choons from the 50s. And here you can see them in a Peter, Bjorn and John (of whistley song fame) video.