Tanabata

I walked into Tanabata in Kyoto without planning to. The streets were crowded with festival-goers, vendor stalls everywhere, the usual summer chaos. But these girls kept appearing through the crowds—maybe five or six of them in proper kimonos, not rentals—and I found myself looking.

They just looked happy. Not trying to look happy—genuinely at ease with themselves and the moment. The kimonos were impossible colors, patterns that shouldn’t work together, but on them everything landed. There was no self-consciousness, or else they hid it perfectly.

I took some photos because that’s the work, but I was mostly watching something rare. The willingness to commit to something beautiful—the costume, the gesture, the whole moment—and move through it without thinking. In most places I spend time, that doesn’t exist. There’s always self-awareness, some angle, a sense of being watched even when you’re not. These girls had none of that.

Tanabata’s supposed to be melancholy if you know the story. Two stars separated by the Milky Way, lovers in an old Chinese myth who meet once a year. The mythology is built on longing, on absence. But the festival doesn’t care about that. Just noise and food and bright clothes, everyone inside the moment instead of thinking about it.

The distance between them and me—that was the thing that stuck. They were living in it, I was trying to capture it from outside, and that gap felt like the actual subject. Not how they looked, but what they had that I couldn’t quite photograph.