I wore yukata in summer festival.
Yukata is a casual style of Japanese kimono for hot and humid summer climate.
Most Japanese don't wear kimono in their daily lives now, but many people enjoy wearing beautiful yukata at their special traditional summer festival days.
A festival is a chance of deviating from everyday life which is worthy but sometimes(often?) hard and monotonous. I think that' s why people love and need festivals.
We have various local summer festivals in Japan. Most of them originated from praying rituals to deities for good harvests.
However, commonly, we enjoy Bon dancing, the parade of portable shrines carried by familiar local folks, and various stalls lined on the sides of streets. The stalls demonstrate and sell water balloon yo-yos, scooping goldfishes, cotton candies, flavoured shaved ices, fried noodles, and so on.
All those events, in a group, form a scene which is very comfortable for us Japanese. Then yukata complete it.
My AD has always kept me away from dressing up, since any accessories and coarse/pricking cloths stimulate my sensitive AD skin to deteriorate.
So again it was a difficult decision to me. It took three seasons; I intended to wear yukata two summers ago, I bought and prepared it last summer, and finally I wore it this summer.
(The preparation is to wash off probable chemicals, dusts, and molds on it. Especially, as recent clothes frequently contain residual chemicals used in the process of making them which may induce irritable/allergic dermatitis, washing new clothes before wearing is an essential custom for us AD patients.)
I knew improving my AD condition permitted me to do such a challenge.
I was happy to have the feel of certain recovery as well as special times in beautiful clothes.
2004.9.