Tohoku Rokkon Festival

In the next three weeks, Kris and I only have 2 days off together due to having different schedules for summer camp and summer school.  This past Saturday was one of those days and we decided to spend it going to the pool and seeing the Tohoku Rokkon Festival in downtown Sendai.

To get to the swimming pool, we had to ride our bikes to the subway station (only about 5 minutes by bike), take the subway to downtown, then take a bus to the park.  The whole trip takes about 45 minutes.  And the whole time we are travelling, we are sweating buckets because the heat and humidity here are insane and anytime you step outside here in the summer you just start sweating!  Anyway, we finally got to the park and we couldn't seem to find the entrance.  So I asked a man where the park is (in Japanese!!!).  He looked confused but spouted out something in Japanese about turning right.  Nodding, I said, "Hai" (yes), which is what I typically do when I don't understand what someone is saying in Japanese.  We walked along the edge of the treeline and turned right down a bicycle path which we hoped would take us to the park entrance.  Instead we found a 12 foot wall running along the edge of where the park was supposed to be.  Kris climbed a statue to investigate while I called the International Center.  Turns out the park and pool had been demolished 3 years ago!  So much for the plan of relaxing by a refreshing pool on a hot day.

Since we were close to the botanical gardens and still had 1 1/2 hours to kill before meeting up with our friends, we decided to go check it out.  What we were expecting: a cute, typical Japanese garden with benches and a place to sit in the shade and relax for a bit.  What we found: a hot forest with lots of spiderwebs and blood-thirsty mosquito.  We realized why the "gardens" were empty mid-summer when we left drenched from sweat and itching at our mosquito bites.

Then we headed to Kotodai Park to meet up with our friends for the Tohoku Rokkon Festival and Parade.  We had noticed the extra busyness of the subway, but it wasn't until we got to Kotodai Park that we saw how truly crazy it was.  Our friends met us at the exit, and it's a good thing they did, because we'd have never found them -- or a place to sit -- otherwise.  Our friends had been staking a spot for an hour and we sat another 1 1/2 hours to wait for the start of the parade.  Before the parade, I was a little doubtful about how much I would actually get to see of it, but it turned out we had pretty good seats.


View from my seat before the parade started - you can see why I was skeptical



It was PACKED!!!!!  I had no idea the festival was going to be so huge.  But I found out that this festival was actually the combination of 6 separate festivals from all over the Miyagi prefecture.  It was the first time this kind of thing had ever happened!  It's no wonder over 360,000 people from all over the prefecture -- and Japan -- turned out for it!



Many people wore summer kimono, like this woman, to celebrate the festivities.



Part of the 200,000 people crowd!

 The Tohoku Rokkon festival celebrated 6 festivals, the Nebuta Festival of Aomori, the Akita Kanto festival, the Sansa Odori of Morioka, the Hanagasa festival of Yamagata, the  Tanabata Festival of Sendai, and the Waraji Festival of Fukushima.  Each section of the parade represented one festival and had singing, dancing, performing, and floats or masks or signs for that festival.    Though there were different dancing groups in different costumes, all the dancers from one section danced to the same music with different choreography.  It was pretty cool and I felt like I was watching years of culture pass before me.  I only wish I knew what all the symbolism meant, but even the Japanese girl with us didn't know what it all meant or the history of everything. 

I tried to get pictures of each "festival" but it was hard from where I was sitting.  I'll post the pictures from each festival and explain a little about each.

The Nebuta Festival happens in Aomori and during it, several large floats are made out of wood and covered with a thin paper and lit from the inside by hundreds of light bulbs.  The festival originated from the Tanabata festival, when people made small boxes with a wooden frame covered with paper, lit them from the inside, and floated them down the river to ward off evil spirits.

Because the crowds were so dense, they actually couldn't fit this float (from that Nebuta Festival) or these large lanterns (from the Kanto Festival) down the parade route!

The Kanto Festival has a long history as Neburi Nagashi (an event to sweep drowsiness away) to repel summer illnesses and evil spirits. Strong men skillfully manipulate and balancing huge kanto, long bamboo poles decorated with many paper lanterns, with a weight of 50 kilograms and a height of 12 meters.

During the Sansa Odori festival, there is a huge drum parade and dancing circle. This festival derives from a local folk tale that tells how people danced with joy, singing "sansa sansa" after a devil, which had been troubling them for a long time, went away.




Accompanied by strong voices shouting "yassho makasho!" and the dynamic sounds of hanagasa taiko drums, dancers in colorful costumes dance in a dynamic manner, waving bowls decoraded with safflowers during the Hanagasa festival.

Hanagasa drummers

Dancers with safflower bowls


In Sendai in  the first week of August, the Tanabata festival is celebrated. This is one of the major star festivals in Japan and has a long history dating back to the 16th century. Many colorful decorations adorn the town, and a parade and music events are also held. The star festival celebrates the one day a year the star prince and star princess are allowed to meet in the sky.

The Waraji festival in Fukushima is named after the huge waraji traditional straw sandals, which are dedicated to Ashio Shrine, to wish for physically strong legs. The waraji are the largest in Japan! There are also hip hop dancers in the parade for this festival.

These men are carrying a giant waraji (sandal)!



We were certianly glad to participate in something so big and so full of culture, but after being packed in with hundreds of thousands of people, we were glad to be home to rest and relax at the end of the day.