The Japanese love festivals (matsuri) to death. It is part of the culture really, that all-encompassing culture that I mentioned before. Summer is the big season for festivals and I was fortunate enough to have stayed there on my own after school had finished in the spring, all the way until the end of August. New Years and the blooming of the sakura (cherry blossoms) are also major festival occasions. Basically, there were more festivals than I could go to, and there were so many small ones you could stumble on without even knowing about them beforehand.
Festivals are often held at shrines to celebrate this or that. I could go into detail, but I would still be missing a lot, so I'll just link you to sites that can tell you more.
Honestly I'm pretty burned out this week as I rush to both start and finish a huge paper I have for one of my classes, so if you don't mind, I'm just going to post up some pictures. The exhaustion is causing me to be unable to remember the festivals I actually went to, so I think doing that is probably for the best.
The same random festival shown at the top
Daimonji (that's the big flaming "dai" kanji on the side of a mountain as seen from somewhere along the Kamogawa in Kyoto)
People playing a pop-gun game at a festival stand. If you like street vendor food (and in Japan, at least, you should), you'll love Japanese festivals. There are TONS of stands.
And I have a thing for posting videos now:
Hey, I remember going to this festival now (except this is the 2006, and I was at the 2007 one)!
And since I had actually wanted to post something unrelated:
No comments:
Post a Comment