Festivals, festivals, festivals

So last weekend, Kenn and I had the wrong weekend - we are idiots. Although we did stumble upon a small festival and had fun it was not THE Sanja Festival (Sanja Matsuri) which is the biggest of Tokyo's three great festivals. During the annual festival millions of frenzied devotees gather for traditional portable shrine processions, ancient ritual music and dancing, and other festivities. The processions are in honour of the three resident deities of the Asakusa Shrine, who are paraded through the streets in huge, elaborately decorated mikoshi or portable shrines carried on the shoulders of dozens of strong men dressed in traditional festival clothing, and surrounded by chanting worshippers. Up to 100 other mikoshi are carried around in processions meant to bring blessings and good luck to the area and its inhabitants.

These days women participate in carrying the shrines too. We did witness something digusting though. Some guys were walking around with huge swollen welts on their shoulders from the weight of all the bouncing up and down of the shrines. I'm talking like the size of golf balls if not bigger! Ick! They were proud of it though.

Even the monchichi's are dressed in festival gear:



Festivals come with tons of food vendors which is always fun. Kenn can't help but try anything octopus, squid or even in this case clams:

But he doesn't always luck out. He ordered something we thought was squid but it tasted completely disgusting. He made me smell it and I almost puked. Curiousity may actual kill Kenn.

We went to the Sanja Matsuri with Meeghan on Saturday and to a Reggae Festival with Meeghan and Cate on Sunday at Yoyogi Park (Cate is Brandon from upstair's friend). It was a free festival and really crowded (surprise surprise). Very cool and kind of a rave-like feel but without any drugs or rowdyness or anything like that. Friends get together, set up their blue tarps (very japanese thing to do) and bring food and drinks:


Here's our set up (I am relaxing and soaking up the beautiful weather):

We were far from the stage where bands and dj's were supposedly playing reggae. We couldn't make sense of it but it seemed like they were playing hip hop and pop but not reggae. Maybe they don't know what true reggae is in Japan? Who knows. Maybe we were just too far to hear it well. One thing is for sure- it may be the only Reggae Fest in the world where no one smokes pot - haha! Only in Japan could that happen. And I kept thinking that outdoor festivals or concerts like this don't really happen in the US anymore and could probably not ever fly in a place like NYC. Public drinking, music and large crowds? Just look at what happened at Woodstock 99. I mean they do exist but usually are accompanied with lots of trash, pollution, drunken fights, etc. Americans just cannot behave themselves to be treated to such wonderful events as these.

Here is a link to all pics from last week and this week's festival festivities. I made lots of captions and if you scroll through the pics it will give you a real feel for what matsuris are like. We ran out of memory space so there's not much from reggae fest but we did bring our video camera so hope to post videos sometime.