Editor’s Note: We asked Bay Area dancer Tracy Lee to write up her experiences as a Japanese-American going to her first lindy event in Japan. Here’s what she shared.

When I first impulsively bought my ticket to the Osaka Lindy Exchange, which took place from October 19 to October 21, I didn’t know what to expect. The one thing I personally knew about Osaka was that the people tend to be very warm and open. So I asked around my local scene in the Bay Area about what Osakan dancers were like. People told me that the scene is relatively small, but they make up for it by partying hard. Sounded intriguing!

The event was larger than I expected. There were a couple hundred people in attendance hailing from different parts of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. There were a good handful of Europeans and Americans visiting as well. Unexpectedly, I was not the only person from the Bay Area there; two other dancers from my scene ended up at the same event completely by chance.

The number of people there was especially felt in the smaller bar venues we were at for the Friday main dance and the Saturday Late Night. I had a conversation about it with the organizer of the fledgling scene in Kobe (a city just outside Osaka) and he informed me that venue space was one of the key struggles they faced. Cities in Japan are dense, and large dance floors are hard to come by.