BunkaHashi Festival celebrates Japanese art and pop culture

By Justin Seward - Lethbridge Herald on October 4, 2022.

The BunkaHashi Festival was hosted at the Buddhist Temple of Southern Alberta on Saturday.

The Festival is an inclusive multi fandom convention that mixes traditional Japanese arts and performances with anime, comics, Japanese pop culture, fantasy and gaming.

It was after the 2019 event that the BunkaHashi Festival was taken over by the Nikkei Cultural Society.

“We are an outreach committee for them,” said Jonathan Neilson, Nikkei Cultural Society board director who oversees the BunkaHashi Festival.

“So BunkaHashi roughly translates as ‘cultural bridge’ and the idea is we want to put on events that kind of are bridged between say more traditional art forms and performance and then the popular culture. So things like we have the Minyo Dancers and Taiko Drummers, for example that are a part of NCS that are performing at this event and at the same time we’re doing video games.”

Neilson and his wife moved to the city from out east and his impression while searching for a festival such as this was that there were people that had this common interest but there wasn’t really an event that was running regularly.

“So my kind of thought is well you make the community you want to live in,” said Neilson. “I wanted there to be a forum like this where people are interested and passionate about something, a hobby or whatever it is, they have a chance to kind of show it off to other people. And then the other thing that I kind of believe in is you don’t know what you like until you see it. So we want the events that we put on to be a mix of a lot of things.”

Attendees could sit in on panel discussions that were made up of different fandoms such as Cosplay and Furries that were represented in the community, a dance group from Calgary and taiko drummers.

“We had friends from FallCon which is a gaming convention in Calgary,” he said. “They came down and they were running a board game section at the festival today and the other one is our exhibitor area.”

Cryleigh Art, who was dressed up as Joseph Desaulniers from the mobile game Identity V, was attending her second festival in Lethbridge after attending the first one in 2019.

She was selling posters and charm keychains depicting characters from various Asian media.

“I like very cutesie anime, so usually like lots of cute anime girls,” she said.

“Even if I’m into something that’s a little bit less cutesie – my style is very cutesie… I really like idle characters, like they always have real fun outfits and designs.”

Art said typically it’s centred around Japanese or Asian media but any type of convention of this nature is celebrating “nerdiness” in general.

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