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.

Some Foods and a Celebrity? Sighting

Had a great dinner at a Korean BBQ called Ton-chan. As usual for k-bbq, lot of small sides and awesome meat to make lettuce tacos out of along with the garnishes.

Bacon tastes good....
Bibs....
and cheesey rice...
Another night we went to an Okinawan restaurant with Michael, who relieved us of all the stress of menus and ordering. This isn't our pic but is representative of the Umiburo (sea grapes) we had. They are some kind of seaweed I take it; kinda unremarkable on taste (salty, oceany), but quite a mouth experience.
and this guy was part of a parade in Shibuya - people were excited, there was confetti... no idea

Meiji Temple Complex

Some various shots from a wander in and around the Meiji Shrine complex...

This is the entrance to the shrine proper, only notable really by the colored papers hanging from branches strung up above the door. These were all over town (including in a spot set aside in subway stations) leading up to Tanabata.

These are wishes and prayers written by visitors on wood blocks (for a small donation) and hung outside the temple.
A wedding party at the temple doing their photos.
Barrels of sake about-to-be?, just?, in-the-process-of-being? blessed at the shrine.
The 'emperor's fishing hole'... the koi swarms can be seen in plebe areas too.
There is a martial arts center in the complex/park where people seemed to be competing at Kyudo - traditional archery. Lot of ritualized movements leading up to and following each shot. Each group of five was a unit; so one shooter from each group at about the same stage of shooting. They are shooting at a rather remarkably small target - about 8 in diam. at about 60 yard range.
Video here isn't the best quality, but gives the general idea. If you listen closely you can tell that the second shooter hits the target -- the audience of shooters in the background make a fssssh-sound for every hit, which was most of the time actually.

Tsukiji Market

This is a little out of order chronologically, but I wanted to share nonetheless. The very first morning after Ryan and I arrived, we woke up at 4am and decided to do what every jet-lagging tourist is supposed to do when they're awake at that ungodly hour: go to the tsukiji fish market (sounds like skeegee). We caught the first subway of the morning and headed southeast to the harbor. Once there we let our noses guide us to the giant warehouse area of fish being bought and sold every day in Tokyo.

By far the most spectacular part is the daily auction of tuna. Here you can see the floor of one of many large rooms filled with the frozen behemoths.
There is a little flap cut out of the skin near the tail. Potential buyers spend some amount of time pulling down the little flap, grabbing a little chunk of meat and rolling it around in their fingers. We saw one guy do this rolling, looking, rolling, looking on one fish for a good 5 minutes.
Then the auction begins. Each warehouse has about 4 auctioneers, each in charge of about 5 dozen tunas. The auctioneer stands up on the stool and starts ringing a bell to call the attention of all the buyers. This one additionally had sort of a marching thing going on. They call out prices, much in the same way that we've heard western auctioneers, and the buyers would raise hands with various gang signs, that apparently represent numbers. I have no idea what one of these tunas goes for, since counting and numbers were (and still are) completely incomprehensible to us, but a google search just told me that one can go for 10's to 100's of thousands in USD!

After the market we went to a nearby restaurant and had sushi for breakfast.

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!