Return to Pasar Moon

Last year, when we first made the acquaintance of the good folks at Pasar Moon, we were immediately welcomed into this small, close-knit family.  Though Pasar is ostensibly a cafe and campground, we arrived at the beginning of the season, when customers were in short supply. The daily routine involved the two of us, Pasar's proprietors (Aki and Natsu), and one other WWOOFer.  Basically, we were special; we were kept up to speed in the goings-on of opening Pasar for the year, there was plenty of obvious work to be done, and we were the featured entertainers at an impromptu party they threw.

This time, we had no way of knowing what to expect, so in our pessimism, we feared we would be lost in the shuffle.  I don't know from music festivals.  I've been to a couple in my day, sure, all of them different.  For whatever reason, I most expected that the annual Pasar Music Festival would be most like the "Purple Nozzle" festival we attended in Korea: loud, dirty, crowded, expensive, running until the wee hours of the morning, and generally just an event by and for people who make me feel about a dillion years old.  To be honest, I was a bit worried.  We'd planned a lot around attending this festival -- Aki's invitation to perform at the festival was the main reason we came back to Japan in the first place -- and as were about to arrive, we realized we could be heading for an event that we might bitterly hate.

When another unfamiliar staff member dropped us off at the front gate, all our worries were erased.  There was Natsu, warm and competent as always, and Aki, too, happy to see us in his own grumpy way.  Many new friends awaited us, too, and we learned all their names (and promptly forgot them) over one of Natsu's amazing meals.


"Aki-san, we want to help!" I blurted out at one point.

"OK, ask Natsu," he told us as he clicked away on his computer.

"Natsu-san, we want to help!"  She smiled and said there would be plenty of work for us to do if we wanted to help out.  Even though part of our visit as guest musicians involved free room and board, the thought of just standing by without pitching in filled me with shame.  Besides, we didn't just want to be visitors, we wanted to be part of the Pasar family again.

"First, though, we have to rehearse," Jenn said.  Also very true: somehow "rehearse for our show" kept getting put off, preempted by to the previous week's goal of "escape the typhoon."  Natsu agreed enthusiastically and showed us to the Dragon Room.

So named because it is a room.

Before long, we made the acquaintance of two of Pasar's current WWOOFers: a 17-year-old American gal who, after five weeks at Pasar, had become the beloved mascot of the place, and a 24-year-old Austrian mechanical engineer who very quickly became a giant pain in our butts.  The first words out of his mouth were a humblebrag (never a good sign): apparently at his last WWOOF host in Malaysia, he was made the manager of the cafe within a month of working there.  He left, he said, because it was too much work, sometimes 16 hours a day by the end of his stay there, and he was paid in beer and cigarettes.

Still, we made the most of our situation, trying to stay true to our pledge of support to Natsu: the Austrian and I wove together a roof of young bamboo for a hangout spot, we helped Natsu in the kitchen, we set up tent after tent and we practiced until our little fingers turned bloody.  All in wonderfully typhoon-free weather, naturally.  For the first 24 hours, while it was still uncertain if we were volunteers or part of the family, we had found our groove, and life was sweet.

Things changed when the festival opened on Monday.  The formerly spacious campsite and buildings made of reclaimed materials grew full and noisy, not with the young rave crowd of Purple Nozzle, nor the young, dreadlocked hippie crowd we'd been expecting.  For the most part, the two hundred or so attendees were either families or single older dudes who had grown exceedingly weird in their age and single-ness.



It's funny, but when all these people both exciting and ordinary filed through the entrance, I felt more than anything like that awkward, friendless 13-year-old at the middle school dance again.  Should I just invite myself into the happy reunions that our Pasar friends were sharing with these colorful characters?  Just sit at the Bamboo Bar and strike up a conversation with the guy with the enormous dreads?  What business did I have joining conversations when I frequently couldn't understand what these people were saying?  What if they didn't like me and stuffed me in a locker?  I solved this dilemma by hurriedly finding work that needed doing, although that presented a problem in itself: to find Natsu-san, who's busy every second of the day, and ask her to find a chore that can be done by someone with no appreciable skills, then explain it to me in simple Japanese...well, as often as not, I wondered if I might not be more helpful by just staying out of the way.

The festival began with a ceremonial appeal to the Earth, the theme of this year's festival being "Earth Week."  Or, rather, it was supposed to, but things got going kind of late, and if there was such a ceremony, I must have blinked and missed it.  Jenn and I missed the first few performances on the outdoor stage, opting to find somewhere quiet for some last-minute rehearsal.  At 9:00, we entered the Dragon Room, raring to go, only to find that there would be a meditation seminar opening for us.  I suggested to Jenn that we sit in on the meditation, eager to get some enlightenment and stuff; she told me that it would just make us fall asleep, but I insisted, hoping to build some good karma by attending another performer's (?) event.

There was much chanting, singing, playing of lyres, and extremely groovy explanations that went clear over my head.  10:00 came and went.  "What time is it, do we still have some time?" the meditation instructor asked at about 10:15.  "Uh..." Aki said, looking for his watch, before she interrupted.  "Well, we'll just do this one more activity, then."

When at last the meditation event and post-event chat had wrapped up, Aki had left the room, so we stormed the stage unintroduced.  Well, "stormed" might not be quite accurate.

"Should we start?" I asked, surveying the room.  There were maybe six very sleepy-looking people in the audience, most of them left over from the meditation and presumably too relaxed to get up.

"I don't know...I guess so?"  At the back of the room, someone cheered, so we struck up the band.

It wasn't a great show, maybe, but without a doubt, it was a good show.  The audience was very appreciative, especially one drunk Michigander who wandered in at one point, but it remained in the single digits for the whole show.

"Okay, so, we're going to take a break," Jenn announced, "but, uh...we'll be back for a second set."

"Maybe?" I added, ever the showman.

By 11:30, we were back in our tent.  At least, we thought, we wouldn't have to worry about the music and dancing going until 5 a.m.; this festival was clearly meant for geezers like us.  The only sounds that drifted into the tent were the crickets and the waves crashing on the nearby shore.