祭り Festivals

I've been to a bunch of festivals lately and learned about some interesting Japanese traditions. The festival for the city of Nagoya is very large, with several parades and musicians and lots of food. They even re-enacted some historical battles!

Other events were smaller for the local neighborhoods. At a Shinto shrine near Nagoya University, I participated in mochi-nage, or mochi throwing.

People gather around and some participants toss mochi into the crowd. It was pretty scary. The old Japanese ladies are really competitive and they push and shove their way to the front so they can get the most mochi. Also, even though most of the throwers tried to gently toss the mochi, they are pretty dense, so if they hit you in the head, it hurts. I went with the "hold the bag open above my head and hope for the best" approach, and I caught one mochi! The people who actually tried caught around 5 mochi.

The spoils!

Although many festival events are now secular, they are based on religious celebrations. An important part of any festival is when a large group of people carry a portable shrine called mikoshi through the neighborhood. I *almost* got to help carry a heavy mikoshi at the Katayama Shrine Festival. Unfortunately, the event was rained out... BUT! we still got to try on the traditional hanten jacket and some really complicated wrap-around pants called momohiki. And since there were supposed to be a lot of people working hard to carry a heavy mikoshi, there was a lot of food provided, so we got a nice lunch and they let us take home the extras. As a poor international student, I really appreciated their generosity.