Hey all! Had quite the busy past week here in Japan. Every summer here is always full of summer festivals. Aomori prefecture, the prefecture I am currently living in, is host to the Neputa and Nebuta festivals. They are quite rambunctious affairs, with loud cheering, lots of food and drink, and of course, dancing. I even got the opportunity to participate in Neputa here in Hirosaki with my fellow exchange students. So let’s get right into it with the details!
Before I talk about the festivals, I should mention the end-of-the-semester party I had with my Japanese business class. During the final class, Onishi-sensei invited us all to come with him to a beer garden at the Hirosaki Plaza Hotel later in the evening. I should mention that a beer garden is not a place where beer is literally pouring out of fountains in the middle of a bunch of greenery, it is just a place that is very much akin to an izakaya, except that they are always on the top stories of buildings and are open-air. It was my first time going to one, so I was quite excited to see what it was all about and hang out with my friends. We ended up having a lot of beer and a lot of grilled meat, cooked using these little gas grills at our tables. If there are two staples of eating out at a Japanese restaurant, they are beer and/or self-cooked meat.
Myself, Hojin and Alex raise a toast at a beer garden
The following afternoon I was off to school to get ready for Neputa. We all met at the International Exchange Center around four in the afternoon to put on our happi, the traditional dress that people wear during Neputa. We would all be marching in the parade, in addition to pulling along a float. I got a great shot with the other guys right after we put on the gear:
We walked all the way down to Dote-machi, one of the main stretches of road in Hirosaki. There, we were to wait around for a long while, because we were to be the last ones to go in the parade. So, we hung around for a bit and I ended up taking a few pictures. I actually ran into my host family there and I introduced them to some of the other exchange students. I got a good picture with my host family in front of our float:
Here’s a shot of the whole float:
Eventually, it was our turn to start marching down the road. The drums and flutes were starting up and the people in front of us were starting to move. I ran out to the front, grabbed ahold of the rope that we were towing the float with (no engine except to power the lights) and started our chanting. I’ll show you some video from it here, so you can see for yourself. The first half of this is Neputa, and the second half is Nebuta in Aomori, which I will talk about after this:
Seeing these festivals is quite different from being in them, and the Nebuta festival in Aomori was quite different all-around for the simple fact of how much larger it was than Hirosaki’s festival. I went down with a few of the other guys and hopped on the train around one in the afternoon. We arrived with plenty of time before the festival, but even then it was still quite crowded. We were able to find a place to sit and we settled in for a bit. All of the vendors were open, with their yakitori, yakisoba, hot dogs and beer, so I helped myself to a dinner of festival food.
Hanging out before Nebuta. Mind the hairy legs! >_<;;
We had the good fortune of having a drum and flute team in front of us as the festival was about to begin. As soon as the gunshot went off, they laid into their instruments and blew my eardrums away with a wave of noise. But really, it was quite fun. I noticed that there are basically three main components to these festivals - drums and flutes, the floats and teams of dancers, and each set of these was usually sponsored by some company or another. For a great example, here’s one of the guys from Suntory’s (a popular drink company in Japan) dance team:
I think that the main attraction of Nebuta has got to be the floats, though. Unlike the ones in Hirosaki’s Neputa, they are fully three-dimensional, papier-machie works of art. Unfortunately, it was raining, but I still managed to get some decent pictures of the floats. Every single one features a warrior fighting with some exotic beast or other, in the traditional Japanese watercolor style. They are quite large and stunning to see in person:
Thursday was the last day of Nebuta and I managed to get to see that as well, because the final day of the festival is different from the preceding days. The floats get to make good on their namesake and are floated out on the water in Aomori bay, while fireworks illuminate the sky overhead. The chants of rassera! rassera! can be heard from loudspeakers and spotlights added to the festive and very loud and flashy nature of Nebuta. I couldn’t take any decent pictures of this, mainly because there were so many people and we had to watch everything from a pretty far distance, but I will say that it was probably my favorite night of the festival. The entirety of Neputa/Nebuta was great, what will all the energy and noise and lights. The Japanese really know how to have a party and bring everyone out. Parades back home just seem kind of tame now.
Well, this is probably going to be the final post before I head off to Korea tomorrow evening. Yep, if you have been following my Twitter then you should know that I’ll be hanging out with my friends Lim and Hojin in Seoul and Pusan for two weeks starting on the 11th. I don’t have any real plans on what to do, but I’m sure that those guys have some ideas. My birthday as well is on the 16th, so I’ll be partying it up in Korea somewhere that night. It will be my first birthday in a foreign country, I hope that it’ll be a memorable one! I hope to be able to twitter every once in a while, but no guarantees. Well, until next time then! See you in two weeks.
Zoe Says:
