Ethnic Aikawa (3): An Unexpected Khmer Festival

After eating Peruvian cake, we got back in the car and headed for a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in Aikawa.

I had already learned that there was a Vietnamese temple in this area, where many Indochinese refugees settled after the Vietnam War. I wondered whether those who had left Vietnam before the socialist government came to rule the entire country had been Buddhists.

Then, as we were driving along, we suddenly saw a crowd of people ahead of us — and an unmistakably Southeast Asian-looking building.

It was too soon for us to have reached the Vietnamese temple we were looking for. And the people gathered there looked more Khmer than Vietnamese.

Suddenly, Southeast Asia by the Roadside

We pulled over and walked toward the crowd and the building, which looked vaguely Thai or Cambodian.
Some kind of festival seemed to be taking place.But we had literally just happened upon it while driving past, so we had absolutely no idea what was going on.
It was so unexpected that we could only stand there in amazement. Were we really still in Kanagawa Prefecture?As far as I could tell, we were probably the only Japanese people there.And then, in the middle of rural Kanagawa, we suddenly found ourselves caught up in this procession.What on earth was happening?

It felt as though we had somehow been transported through time and space to somewhere else entirely.We made our way around the crowd to the front of the procession.It did not seem to be a wedding.

A Festival of the Cambodian Community

A figure in the form of a monkey was collecting donations.
¥1,000 notes and even ¥10,000 notes were being handed over one after another.
I could tell that this was an annual festival, but the scale of it was impressive.

The Cambodians gathered here ranged from children to elderly people. They did not seem to be people who had only recently come to Japan, but rather members of a community that had been living here for many years.

I wondered whether some might have roots in the Indochinese refugee community that came to Japan decades ago.

What fascinated me most was seeing Cambodian people who had made their lives in Japan continuing to preserve the culture of their homeland.

Something We Had Never Planned to Find

I had no idea that this festival was being held that day.
In fact, I did not even know there was a Khmer temple here.
We had simply been driving past when we stumbled upon it.That made it feel as though we had discovered something remarkable completely by chance.I was very glad we had come.