Day 5-6 of the Tohoku road trip:
The locals spend a whole year creating these enormous floats by hand designing wire and bamboo frames and covering them with fragile, painted washi paper. To finish it off, hundreds of lights are woven under the inside of the paper so that the floats are illuminated in colour making them breathtaking to behold at night. Then combine these with the noise and colour of thousands of dancers, taiko drummers, flutists, and over a million onlookers in the crowd, all chanting “Rassera rassera!”
The second day we bought the Nebuta costumes and took part in the parade. We pinned all the bells we’d collected the previous day on our yukata and primed our legs for 2 hours of non-stop hopping! The most enjoyable part of the whole thing was choosing who to give our bells to during the parade. The children at the front had bags full of bells they’d collected, so I enjoyed throwing them to people at the back of the crowd that made eye contact with me. I only nailed 2 people in the head accidentally, most of my bells made it to their target! Tom’s on the other hand favoured delivering bells to the old grandmas and seeing the joy spread over their faces.
The absolute highlight of the trip was our 2 days in Aomori attending the Nebuta matsuri. You may have seen photos of this festival before. It’s the one with the huge, illuminated floats depicting scary Japanese gods and mythical creatures that are spun around through the streets!
The locals spend a whole year creating these enormous floats by hand designing wire and bamboo frames and covering them with fragile, painted washi paper. To finish it off, hundreds of lights are woven under the inside of the paper so that the floats are illuminated in colour making them breathtaking to behold at night. Then combine these with the noise and colour of thousands of dancers, taiko drummers, flutists, and over a million onlookers in the crowd, all chanting “Rassera rassera!”
Not only is this festival visually impressive, it’s also incredible fun to participate in! The dancers in the festival wear the traditional haneto dancing costume, which is like a yukata but much shorter, making it easier to jump around and dance in, and it also has a big sash tied around the shoulders and the back, probably to make the sleeves shorter, but likely for no reason other than it looks really cool! The best part of the costume though is the 50 or so bells that are pinned to each dancer because as the parade moves around the town, the bells are taken off and thrown or given to spectators on the street, young or old, everyone enjoys catching a bell!
The first night we dressed in our regular yukata and sat on the edge of the street drinking and eating festival food when a few of the dancers came over to us yelling “Rassera rassera” (which doesn’t mean anything, it’s just something you yell at this festival), taught us the dance (which involved a huge amount of hopping, the higher the better!) and then gave us a bell each! We quickly learned that the more we danced and shouted rassera, the more bells we accumulated. We even made friends with the people next to us on the street, even though their small boys kept stealing our bells.
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| Selflessly giving a little boy one of her bells |
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| Even the dog was wearing the traditional haneto costume! |
This festival was incredible to observe as well as participate in and has been my favourite event during my time in Japan. I highly recommend you make your way up north to Aomori if you’re planning a trip to Japan in August.
