This afternoon, Alice & I are going on a trip around the north of Japan. We’re going to visit Osore-zan, literally “Mount Fear”. Then we’ll catch the ferry up to Hokkaido, hang around in Sapporo & surrounds for a few days, then overnight ferry back to Sendai… Then it’s time for me to come home.

I don’t expect there’ll be a lot of internet connectivity around those parts, so I’ll have to do retrospective blogging. I’ve got photos and stories to tell, but they’ll all have to wait.

So… ciao for now!

Way back when it was Tanabata, we saw the best matsuri parade ever. There was taiko, acrobats, and a squillion dancers. We had a great spot and it was good fun.

Here are some photos of it!

Seriously, there were a lot of lanterns.

The main feature of the tanabata festival is the paper lanterns that get hung up around the city. Sendai has 2 main pedestrian malls packed with shops of all kinds, cafés, restaurants and pachinko parlours. For the festival, different organisations — whether it’s a community group, a company pretending to be a community group, or a company just flashing their brand around — make these giant paper lantern-esque decorations. I don’t really know what to call them, but they are genuinely spectacular! They’re hung from bamboo stalks high in the air draped across the street, and hang down to shoulder level.

There were so many different types of lantern that it’s hard to know which ones to describe. I tried to take enough photos to give an impression of the variety, scale and colour that we enjoyed while wandering the streets, milling through the dense but well-behaved crowd.

I think the crane lanterns were by far the most impressive to me – over one million paper cranes donated by people all over Japan to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Japan. The honesty of the little handwritten sign, along with the striking beauty of the lanterns they made from the cranes, made for a really poignant memorial — a kind of bittersweet optimism. It made quite an impression.

I took some video, too, which I’ll upload later on. In the meantime, soak up the pictures!

In the final segment of the epic journey that was Thomalavé 2010, we went to the Odaka “Wild Horse Catching” event. Traditionally, this was an offering of wild horses from local samurai lords to the local temple, where they would be kept as assets. The samurai would round up the local brumbies and run them up to a pen in front of the temple, where the acolytes would have to attempt to catch, halter and break in the horses. Presumably this was accompanied by a given amount of chaos, kicking and blood, from all parties concerned. Like most things here, it became something of a ritual, and has been on-going for some hundreds of years.

The only problem is, even rural Japan must have run out of wild horses pretty quickly.

The spectacle was impressive in its die-hard at-all-costs adherence to tradition and ritual, if not in the “raw power of man” which the brochure claimed would be on display. When the acolytes are all over 50 years old, the “wild horses” have not only clearly been handled before but all arrive shod and one with a plaited forelock, and the whole exercise goes down with less fuss than I’ve had trying to catch my own horse, the whole thing was a bit of a joke.

We all had a good time, though; despite sweating, hungover, in the 30+ degree sun, surrounded by crowds, Japan somehow manages to pull through with its inherent friendliness and soft touch. The costumes (I hesitate to call them anything else) and the genuine tradition of the temple (at least it was the same temple from the olden days) made for a romantic ambience. There was at least one young colt who seemed unbroken and lively. We gave up before he was caught; it didn’t look like they were going to have too much trouble, and we were facing a long hike back home where the blessed Katie had prepared a traditional American breakfast of waffles, bacon and whipped cream.

It was a wonderful end to Thomavalé.

On the night of my birthday, Alice and Katie had arranged for the local government to set up a bit of a fireworks show in my honour. It was really too much of them!

It was fun wandering about the town, enjoying the small-town-livened-up-by-big-festival atmosphere. The fireworks themselves were super-impressive, although as a show it was a bit odd. A lot of Japanese events seem to have a lot more talking and speeches than what I’m used to. A fireworks show at home is rockin’ to music, no speeches, and all over in about an hour. This one was preceded by almost an hour of speeches, including multiple MCs, then the show was narrated as it went along. They would let off a firework or two, the crowd would clap politely, then the MCs would say a little “notice the red sparkles on this next one, isn’t it nice?”, and so on. It was kind of funny, really — it was like listening to an episode of Iron Chef or something.

That didn’t stop the display from being really impressive. I kind of thought I was over fireworks — seen one, seen ‘em all and all that. But these were just MASSIVE! They went up higher in the air than I’ve ever seen and when they went off they lit up the whole crowd and the paddocks around them. The scale was just immense. The fireworks were pretty damn good too, with some cool multi-layered, multi-colour effects.

I’ve always thought there was little point in taking photos of fireworks as most of the effect comes from the size, sound and light, but hey, these didn’t turn out too badly.

Back to the celebrations of 2 weekends ago, after the samurai races, all the samurai ride back home to their towns. They make a bit of a parade of it, and it was good to have the opportunity to check them out close up.

Apparently all the samurai are descendants of samurai families, and though most of their armour is reproduction, it’ll be faithful to their family equipment. They’ll use what original gear still remains, but obviously that will vary from family to family. The banners are their family crests. I’m not informed enough to know much more than that, sadly, but it’s probably quite rich in tradition.

Anyway, on to the pictures!

I’m not actually particularly clear on the tradition of the festival or what it’s supposed to represent, exactly. Sadly, it’s wiki page is the worst Wikipedia article I’ve ever read, and the couple of Japanese people I’ve asked basically say “well, it’s a festival, innit”. It’s the biggest summer festival in the northern region, and millions of people travel from miles around to come to Sendai to see the parades, fireworks, and especially these giant paper lantern things that are really stunning and everywhere.

We’re lucky to be in Sendai for it, so our friends Abigail & Shelly came up from the Fukushima coast to make a weekend of it. And did we ever!

The summer festival season is when everyone gets their traditional dress on, and the girls weren’t about to miss out; I took it as an excuse to wear my pyjamas around town and have it be socially acceptable. So we dressed up and made a night (well, 3 nights!) of it.

Thursday night’s event was fireworks; allegedly there were 16,000 fireworks being let off. We got there too late to get a spot where you could really see them, though; the streets were SUPER crowded, and lined with food stalls, drink stalls and onlookers. We found a pretty good spot and waited for Alice’s friend Aya to come find us. What we could see of the fireworks was pretty impressive, but it was really about just soaking up the festival atmosphere. Well, that and the beer.

We went out to dinner with Aya and her friend afterwards, to a delicious restaurant whose name unfortunately I can’t remember. It was very European (actually, very Australian!) and not at all Japanese, which was cool, because it was full of festival revellers in their traditional dress and the culture mix was refreshing. Also refreshing was the insanely delicious food.

So after getting dressed up, catching the fireworks and hitting the town, we decided to call that a warm-up and head on home to recuperate.

More photos later! Many more photos…

On Saturday we headed out to the Samurai Races. I was kind of expecting a few old guys wearing their grandfather’s old helmet having a bit of a trot around a paddock, or at best a gymkhana vibe. I was not expecting several hundred dudes on horseback, decked out in full regalia, having proper racetrack races in front of thousands of people.

It was a pretty short-but-sweet event. We got there after it had supposedly started, but we didn’t miss out on too much. It started off with straight-up races around the tracks.

That was pretty damn impressive, I have no idea how they go that fast carrying those huge banners. They must have bloody good horses.

The atmosphere at the event was pretty subdued because it was incredibly hot and sunny. It must have been close to 40 degrees, and we were suffering sitting in the shade — to say nothing of the samurai on horseback in the sun, wearing however many kilos of black swadding and armour! We saw two races, and both times one of the horses finished without its rider. I reckon they passed out and fell off.

After the races there was a brief delay while they got everyone organised for the main event — the “mock battle”. We kinda had to work it out for ourselves but basically there were hundreds of samurai massed on the main field:

Then fireworks were fired carrying red and blue ribbons, which proceeded to drop to the ground. The samurai wheeled around in a mass to try and catch the ribbons as they fell. It was a bit like parachutes on cracker night, except with horses, and swords. Pretty impressive.

It was pretty dangerous apparently, I saw one guy pass out and fall off (presumably from the heat — he didn’t move after he got up) and all in all we saw 3 ambulances get called onto the field. Pretty hardcore! Makes pony club feel a bit soft.

That was pretty much all there was to it actually, the races and the battle. Given the crowd, and the amount of effort everyone put in, the duration was a bit of an anticlimax — but it was certainly spectacular to see!

I took a bunch of pictures, just randomly snapping away. Here are the ones that are any good:

After all that, we escaped the heat and headed back to Katie’s for a much-needed cooldown and preparation for… Part III of Thomavalé World Tour!

It was my birthday on the weekend, and Alice managed to outdo last year’s deep sea party by negotiating with the regional government to hold the yearly samurai festival in my honour.

There were quite a few events, most of which involved samurai on horseback, and I took a bunch of pictures. I’ll break it up over a couple of posts.

It started off with a street festival, or matsuri. A matsuri is much like any street festival, with food stalls, a music stage, and a parade. However it’s about ten basquillion times more interesting than ones anywhere else, because the parade is always huge (everyone gets in on it) and everyone uses it as an excuse to dress up in their traditional clothes, giving the whole thing a really special vibe. At least, I hadn’t been to one before, and I was thoroughly impressed.

There was food on sticks ahoy, although we only managed to try scallops and fried chicken before getting distracted by the parade. We missed out on chocolate-covered bananas with sprinkles (think soft serve, but with a banana instead of icecream), much to our chagrin.

There was a small band playing traditional music throughout the parade. It was being piped through the main street on PAs, and it basically did exactly this for about 4 hours:

Which wasn’t unpleasant, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be performing.

The parade was very impressive. Various groups put in a “float” although it tends not to be an actual float so much as a group of people dressed the same. Everyone does the same micro-dance all the way down the street, which prevents it from becoming simply a forced march. There were a few cool things though, shrines, trucks with taiko drummers, a geisha, etc.

We saw Cody & Ari (two of the gaijin we went camping with last weekend) in one of the groups, so Alice joined in the parade, and we met up with them afterwards. After some confusion, we ended up being asked back to Cody’s judo teacher’s brother-in-law’s house. We didn’t quite know what we were getting ourselves into but we had a hilarious time chatting to old drunk Japanese country dudes, and eating their delicious food and being plied with sake. All in all a lovely evening!

Here are the rest of the photos from the festival.