Japan has a lot of festivals during the year. I found out about this particular one through a local travel agency. For those who don't know, Daiko or Taiko is a type of Japanese drum, usually quite large. The event was basically a drum competition between groups from all over Japan. Each group designs a portable shrine with a drum attached to the front and parades in succession in front of the audience and judges, who are either seated in bleachers or just standing around the parade area. Here is a picture of one of the shrines.
On the day of the event, our group got there a few hours before the official start of the drum competition, so we had time to check out the surrounding area beforehand. After buying a ticket for a seat in the bleachers, I went exploring and found the local mall. By some amazing coincidence, the mall had a traveling exhibit in a small museum. Can you guess what the exhibit was? A traveling exhibition of Hokusai pieces from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Hokusai is probably the most famous ukiyo-e artist, who is most famous for his Great Wave print. Seeing the advertisements in the mall, I couldn't resist the temptation to go and see the exhibit. There were a lot of good pieces in the exhibit and I grabbed a few souvenirs from the souvenir store on my way out.
I made it back to the main parade area just in time to catch the opening ceremony, which consisted of a group of guys carrying a shrine down the main parade area, then heaving it in the air a few times. It was fun to watch and I was in the perfect position to get a video of it.
I felt bad for the guys carrying that thing. It was super-hot that day. Anyway, after they passed by, I was able to get back to the bleachers and watch the drum competition commence. Since I was one of the last ones to get to the bleachers, I was forced to stand for a while. Although I would have liked to sit down at that point, it was actually good, since it gave me a good vantage point for taking pictures of the event, which you can see on my Facebook page. After about an hour or so, I got tired of watching the parade and standing in the heat, so I decided to wander around some more. There was a large castle nearby, so I took some pictures of that. I think it was closed for the festival, so I couldn't actually go see it in person that day, which was a little unfortunate.
Since the drum competition was part of a larger festival, there were a lot of booths set up to sell food, items, and also for playing some carnival type games. The tour guides had given us a map of the local area in advance, and I had seen something that particularly interested me, so I headed off to find one of my favorite places in any area, the local bookstore! I browsed the shelves for a while and ended up getting some manga volumes and possibly also a CD, IIRC. By that point, I was getting hungry, so I headed back to the mall and got some food. And then it was time to go back to the bus for the trip home. I had to find an alternate route to avoid the crowds and some shrine bearers coming the way I had originally come down and saw the entrance to the castle along the way, which I had missed earlier.
That's it for now. Hopefully it won't be this long before my next post! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment