Yamakasa Festival

The Yamakasa festival was this morning at 5 am. I already kind of explained it in a previous post, but was a little mistaken. The shrines/floats the men (who wear only loin cloths and teenage mutant ninja turtle boots might I add) carry around town are not as big as the decorative ones (with the exception of the last float which you can see in the video), yet they still weigh around 1 ton and are carried (run) all over the city. I met my friends at around midnight downtown to drink before the festival. We found a good izakaya that had nomihodai (all you can drink) for only 1,500 yen for 90 minutes, so it was a good idea. Oh yeah, I also ate basashi there (raw horse). No, it did not come off a live horse. It wasn't bad, but didn't taste super special either. Kind of like...rare meat =). Anywayy, one of our students gave us special tickets for the festival so we could be in the starting point area. Apparently these tickets are really hard to get, and they were really great seats...er...well a great view we actually didn't get seats because it was so crowded, but it was OK. There were soooooooooooooooo many people. There were eight shrines. In the starting point (the most exciting part of the festival), the shrines have to be run across the arena and are timed for who did it in the best time. Every team has it's own starting time. My neighborhood got the best time =) (I think around 20 seconds). Then, the shrines continue down a "race path" across the city where people stand on the sidelines cheering the whole way like a huge parade. It was a really cool experience to see how important this festival is, and how it has been a tradition for hundreds of years. My favorite pictures of the night. Look at their faces!





The 2nd or 3rd float



The last float--and the biggest! I personally think there should have been fire coming out of it though, haha. I apologize for the weird camera angle, I don't know how to edit videos and flip it.