A Japanese Star Story
A long time ago there was a young man who lived in a small village in Japan. As he walked home from working one day he found the most beautiful cloths he had ever seen. He wanted the cloths so he took them from their replace by the pond and started on his way.
Just then a voice from behind him called "excuse me" he turned around startled to see a beautiful girl "please give me back my robe of feathers" she said "I live in heaven and I just came down to the pond to have a bath. Without my robe feathers I can't go back."The young man was reluctant to give back the robe so he pretended not to know what she meant. "Robe of feathers? I don't have a robe of feathers." Unable to go back to heaven without the robe of feathers the girl had to stay down on earth and. Began to live with the young man.
The girl was actually a goddess and her name was Tanabata. Tanabata and the young man got married lived to get her happily. Several years later Tanabata found the robes between two beams in the ceiling. "I knew it. He has been hiding it." She said to herself. She put on the robe and Began to feel like the goddess she once was.
That evening the young man returned to the house to see Tanabata with the robes on. She began to rise up to heaven and called "if you love me then weave a thousand pairs of straw sandals and bury them around a bamboo tree. If you do this we can see each other again."
The next day the young man began to make the thousand pairs of straw sandals. When he finished, the bamboo tree started to grow high into the sky and the man climbed up the tree. The man and the goddess were overjoyed to see him but Tanabata's father was not impressed that she was in love with a man below. The father made the man watch over a melon field for three days without food or water. The juicy melons were so tempting and on the third day he couldn't bare it any longer and reached for the melon. In that instant the two of them were pulled apart from each other. The two lovers look across the river at each other and became the satrs Altair and Vega. Tanabata's father only lets them meet on the 7th of July once a year.
The Japanese festival Tanabata or the star festival is celebrated on the 7th our July when each person places a wish on a bamboo tree.
