Yesterday Christina and I got to design a flyer for the Japanese star festival Tanabata.
Tanabata (七夕), meaning "the night of the seventh", is celebrated every 7th of July in Japan. This festival derived from the Chinese Star festival Qi Xi and was originally celebrated on the 7th day of the 7th month of the lunar calendar.
The Tanabata festival stemmed back to an old Chinese tale called Kikkoden. It says that the industrious weaver princess named Orihime and the hard-working cow herder prince named Hikoboshi fall in love with each other and forgot to do their work. As a result, Hikoboshi was banished to the other side of the big river (the Milky Way) by Orihime's father, the sky god.
The two lovers are seperate by the Milky Way and they are allowed to meet only once a year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month - on Tanabata. It is believed that Orihime and Hikoboshi cannot meet each other, if the day is rainy because the big river becomes to wide and deep to cross. So people pray for good weather on Tanabata.
Furthermore it is a Japanese tradition to write wishes on tanzaku paper (colorful, small stripes of paper) and to hang them on bamboo branches on Tanabata.
Christina and I preparing tanzaku papers for the customers who want to write their wishes on it. After two hours of cutting papers Christina was making funny faces! I can tell you we had a lot of fun yesterday afternoon...
...and here you can see more hard-working staff of Sakura House at the office in Shinjuku as well as the bamboo branches with the tanzaku at the office.
The flyer Christina and I desiged.