who wears short shorts?

When Chad and Bill were visiting, we were fortuitously graced with an early festival (the season is usually more in July and August) held at the Yushima Tenjin. In the streets near the temple, many portable shrines, or mikoshi, were being carried by teams of people wearing the traditional outfit, which is this cotton wrap shirt, with pants apparently optional. They weave around the neighborhood, yelling and kind of doing "the pony", so that the heavy mikoshi bounces around on their shoulders. It must be incredibly painful and from what we could tell must be some kind of endurance test. Folks follow along encouraging the holders, and subbing in when it becomes unbearable. 

Eventually everyone makes their way to the shrine where there are the typical food stalls that we have come to love. This is where our portion of the endurance test comes in, as we take turns sampling (in no particular order): a gyro; pork on a stick; beef on a stick; a potato chip on a stick (sensing a theme); a lychee fruit thing in gelatin on, you guessed it, a stick; an amaretto cookie thing made in a small pan in front of us; takoyaki (octopus dough balls); baby donut balls (I forget what they are called) and yakisoba noodles. 

While all that eating was going on, we watched the last of the parade trickle in. Here is a guy balancing and dancing with that long stick. Impressive, sure, but my favorite part about this crew, was that the rear of their parade was being brought up by three strollers with sleeping babies.

This crew pulled their drum cart and dead trees (??) through the row of food stalls.

The shrine also provided some live music and a puppet show. Here, Chad and Bill (ubiquitous stick in hand) look on.

There are also games. Here a family of mikoshi holders in their short shorts observe a shooting gallery.

the Laos festival and conveyor belt sushi

Despite Ryan's discovery of a review calling the Laos festival in Yoyogi park "laousy", Chad, Bill and I decided to take a little peak for ourselves. For one thing, the rain wasn't helping them out any. Considering the Thai festival the weekend before had the same areal footprint but with an order of magnitude more people, we weren't very optimistic.

The first thing I notice when we got down there amidst the stalls was a peculiar, slightly rotten smell that reminded me of Singapore. After a little poking around, I found the source of the funky fragrance --THESE GUYS!-- which, you may recall are not my favorite.

We didn't stay long.

On one of the nights of Chad and Bill's visit, we all went to conveyor belt, or "kaiten", sushi at a restaurant near our house. The drill is that various things on small plates go chugging alongside the table and when something looks appealing, you grab it. You can even order things special from that little video screen. When you finish, you push a button on the screen and someone runs over to count up the plates (different color plates mean different prices) and tally your bill. At first we were a little timid. We weren't sure how popular items were and if they had been circling the restaurant for hours or if they were fresh. There were some sushi with creamed corn and some burrito rolls, for instance, that were down right frightening. But once we got the hang of it, we really got the hang of it. Below is the carnage.

Shokihara

Our next adventure was not really a festival, but a shokihara, or summer party, hosted by my work. The professors and grad students prepared yummy traditional foods, including meats and fish on sticks, fried noodles, shaved ice and some mochi concoctions....

Mochi was prepared with the traditional bucket and mallets like so - a process whereby rice is turned into the most sticky, chewy thing imaginable. Traditional new year's fare apparently.

They also had beer and sweet plum wine, an ice block in the middle to allow us to think cool thoughts, blind pinata-style beatings of watermelon and many coworkers dressed in yukata. They even let me wear one for a while. I definitely want to buy one next summer for festival season, although the intricate wrapping

that is involved is pretty intimidating.

so many festivals

We have continued to enjoy the festival season in Tokyo, sometimes partaking in 2 per weekend. Here are some highlights.

On the way to Asakusa for lanterns we stopped by Senso-ji temple, which was having its own thing - some shots from around the place

In Asakusa there is a celebration at the end of Obon, in which you are supposed to light a lantern for deceased relatives and float the lantern down the Sumida river to release their souls. Folks line up with their lanterns about 100 yards down one side of the river, over the bridge, and down the other side of the river. Bystanders (like us) stand on the bridge (below) and watch the lanterns and passenger boats float by. We had a nice spot near the middle of the bridge. Oh and the golden turd, as it is affectionately called, is supposed to represent beer foam rising (designed by architect Philippe Starck), and is perched there on the Asahi Beer Hall.

We also attended the Bon-Odori festival held at the shrine across the street from our apartment. Odori is the word for dance and here everyone does traditional dances in a circle around the drummer. The inner circle of women in Yukata are the experts, so we all just watch them for the first go and then the little, say, four 8-count segment repeats. This one was pretty simple, but the dances start to build on one another and get pretty complicated by the end of the set. The people on either side of me were really nice, explained how things worked and pulled me out there.

Then the same weekend we went to the International festival held in Azabu Juban, which is home to various embassies and many foreigners. Each embassy had a stand with yummy foods from their home country: tacos and nachos from Mexico; brats from Germany; pork on a stick and pad thai from Thailand; chorizo from Argentina; chicken skewers from Egypt. And those were only the stands we actually went to. There were half a dozen more that we missed.

We went with our friends Michael and Momoe, who are here in the massive crowd. This is once it was getting late and thinning out actually.

Unfortunately Festival season will be coming to an end soon. I guess we will now be spending our weekends seeing museums and other sites. And soon there will be Sumo wrestling...

Iitabashi matsuri

They really don't mess around here when it comes to fireworks (or "flower fires", hanabi, as they are called). When we went to the firework festival at Iitabashi there were no fewer than 11,000 individual fireworks. Some people paid for fancy seats, but the rest of us schlubs packed into all the open space on the two banks of the river, for as far as we could see.

The show lasted about an hour and a half and was nonstop. The main difference I saw in the form of fireworks is that they have some that grow slowly like a stem, shooting off to the sides at angles like leaves until finally bursting into a big colorful ball. They also had several Saturns and a segment of colorful rings that I believe was to advertise their bid for the Olympics in 2016.

Here Ryan captured the grand finale - Just fireworks, but we were impressed. Unfortunately the camera does not capture the walloping sound of the large ones:

A great many of the folks (guys and gals) at the festival wore the traditional yukata. Here are a couple of gals waiting for the subway with us.

After the show we grabbed some "Japanese Pizza" or okonomiyaki. Typically you make it for yourself on a big griddle in the middle of the table. I think we may have appeared particularly helpless after the epic firework episode because the waiter/cook took one look at us and offered to make it for us in the back. He removed all sharp and hot objects from our table and went off to work. His creation actually looked and tasted pretty damn good, so perhaps it was for the best.

Another Festival

There are a lot of matsuri festivals about town. These shots are from Mitama Matsrui, just north of the imperial grounds. This one had a tremendously long procession of food stalls, the entertainment included a kind of haunted house and some carnival type performances off to one side. There were also more traditional dance performances in a central spot of the thoroughfare.

I couldn't get any shot that shows the scope of how far the lanterns and stalls went along. To give some idea: There is a statue at the farthest point visible in this pic, which 2 pics down is shown from the other side of the route.

Several of these portable shrines, holding spirits or some-such, were the highlight it seemed. You can sort of make out a troupe of women carrying this one. They were very slowly walked from one end to the temple amidst quite a throng of people. I was exhausted getting through the crowds carrying nothing.

Don't think I've ever seen skylights pointed at people. I think we understood that you can make a donation to sponsor a lantern and get your name on it (bit unsure about this).
...but the sponsorship thing is definitely true for these smaller ones. People seemed to be tracking down a particular lantern and taking a photo with it. We are just faking it.

Shiman Rokusen Nichi Festival in our neighborhood

The shinto shrine directly across the street from our apartment hosted one of the city's Shiman-Rokusen-Nichi festivals - the idea being that visiting the shrine on one of the festival days earns you the equivalent of 46,000 visits. Some streetmeats, homebrew, hippy crafts, and performances.

View from front of our apt. bldg.
This plant was the star of the show for some reason. It is called a 'chinese lantern plant' or 'husk tomato' and looks to be a red tomatillo basically.

The taiko drumming was definitely the highlight on the evening that we went; though the kids kinda steal the show in this clip, and the bass of the drums doesn't really get captured:



The main shrine building after the crowd had gone.

And the centerpiece... The thing is about 20 ft. high and we had no idea it was there after being in our apt. for over a week.

Festival time

Last week we walked/trekked to the nearest JR line station, which appeared much closer on the map. Along the way, however, we were pleased to stumble onto this street fair. There were various food stands, games, kids running everywhere and old guys sitting around in robes looking very official.

Here you put a ball at the top of the game on the right and wherever the ball lands, that is the number of fruit popsicles that you win. The popsicles were actually pieces of fruit with gelatin goop on them and they were sitting on that big cube of ice to form.
Ryan was particularly interested in the fish on the stick. This poor guy was sweating up a storm cooking these heavily salted fishsicles.

mmmgood!

We also devoured some octopus batter balls with mayonnaise and a brown sauce and some donut holes made adeptly with a table-sized waffle iron thing. Ok so this was our first festival. I'm sure we'll become quite familiar with all of these items by the end of the summer. In fact there is one being held tomorrow at the temple right across the street from our apartment. Yay!