The Obashira is a special festival. It only happens every 6 years and is a celebration for renewing the pillars of the Suwa Taisha head shrines (there are 4 of them located in the area) . There are multiple parts to this festival. In April they have the “Yamadashi” (where they bring the trees down the mountain) and in May there is the “Satobiki” were they put the logs into place at the shrine. In the middle of June the festival ends with the “Hoden” ceremony.

The most exciting part of the festival happens during the Yamadashi, where they will ride on the tree logs down a steep hill. Injuries, bone fractures, and sometimes even death happen frequently in this dangerous event where the up to 13 tonnes heavy logs slide uncontrollable down the hill.

Transport: Take the train to Shimosuwa station and from there board one of the shuttle buses that takes you up the mountain. Parking for cars is limited and unless you take the shuttle bus you will have to walk a couple of kilometers up the mountain.

Website: The Onbashira has it’s own dedicated website here (in Japanese as well as English).

The Inuyama festival in Inuyama’s castle town is held on the first weekend of April ever since it started in 1634. There is a total of 13 nicely decorated floats being paraded through the streets. Some of the floats feature mechanical dolls (karakuri ningyou) that perform dances – this can be seen during the early afternoon hours. At night the floats will be decorated with lanterns (each of the float carries exactly 365 lanterns) and paraded through the streets again.

Inuyama town has a niece castle and old town that makes for a nice backdrop for this festival . The festival also very often falls in the same week that cherry blossom trees start to bloom (late March/early April). So if the weather is nice then that makes for an excellent combination of 4 good reasons (festival/weather/cherry/location) to actually go out and enjoy this festival. Unfortunately i only had my light jacket on (Daytime temperatures are already getting hot – but evenings can still be freezing) so i had to give up early and return home. The festival however was really nice and i am planning on going back again next year.

Transport: Inuyama is located about half an hour north of Nagoya. Meitetsu Railways, also known in English as Nagoya Railways, provides the easiest access.

Website: The Inuyama City website has an excellent page with info about this festival here (all in Japanese).

The Honen Matsuri (豊年祭 – actually spelled Hounen with an “u” in there)  is a fertility  festival  celebrated each year on March 15th for the blessings of a bountiful harvest and all manner of prosperity and fertility. It’s probably one of the most famously known festivals outside of Japan and draws a lot of foreigners to see it each year.

The main feature of the festival is a 2.5m long wooden phallus weighting up to 280kg. The object  is carried from a shrine called Shinmei Sha (in even-numbered years) or from Kumano-sha Shrine (in odd-numbered years), to Tagata Jinja. Tagata Jinja is a shrine dedicated to fertility and has a large collection of interesting objects (female and male ones).

The festival starts with celebration and preparation at 10am at Tagata Jinja. At about 2pm the main parade starts and makes its way to the Tagata Jinja. Free Sake is passed out from large wooden barrels during the procession. The festival ends at about 4.30pm with mochi-rice-cakes being thrown at you.

I am not sure what i really should think about this festival. The main attraction certainly is the fertility theme of the festival, but other than that there isn’t much interesting going on in this festival. Most of the time is being spend waiting in line for the procession to pass. If you are visiting Japan then i recommend you to also go see other festivals held during that time (for example the Sagicho matsuri) and not only the Honen Matsuri.

Transport: Tagata-Jinja is at Tagata-Jinja-mae station, one stop further south of Gakuden  station on the Meitetsu Komaki line. There is also plenty of car parking in the area.

Website: None that i can find. There are heaps of travel blogs mentioning it, but Tagata Jinja doesn’t seem to have a website and the Komaki city website doesn’t have a page dedicated to the event.

The Sagicho matsuri is a lot of fun.It’s held on a weekend in the middle of march. During the first day (Saturday) they will parade floats (called Sagicho) made of Wood, Bamboo and straw, decorated with the Chinese zodiac sign of the year through the town. On the second day (Sunday) is where the highlight of the festival happens. In the afternoon the floats are used to fight each other and hopefully flip over the other sagicho float. All of the floats usually take a bit of damage during this wrangle, but that doesn’t really matter because later in the evening all of the floats are getting burned anyway.

There is another festival at the same shrine in middle of April (the Hachiman matsuri) involving fire. The Sagicho festival was actually a response to that one. Newcomers to the area back in the 16th century were so impressed by that Hachiman festival that they decided to organize an even more impressive one and hence the Sagicho festival was born.

Quite a lot of the men in this festival were wearing make-up. I found this a bit strange, but doing a bit of research i was reading about the warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) who was one of the founder of this festival. He was said to wear make-up and dance during the Sagicho festival celebration. This seems to have been tradition during that period, there are also a lot of other famous Japanese historical figures known to wear make-up.

Transport: Close to Obatacho-Shiryokan-mae bus stop on the Chomyo-ji bus route from Omihachiman Station. Omihachiman Station is on the JR Biwako Line from Kyoto Station.

Website:  The Omihachiman city website has some information about the festival.

The Mikabe matsuri is a small local spring welcome festival that doesn’t get a lot of advertising or mentioning anywhere on the net. It’s held in mid-march on the same weekend as the more famous Sagicho Matsuri (which is held just about 15km to the north-west of Mikabe).

The festival is in honor of the fire god of the kitchen (kamado no kami). Ceremonies start at around 10am and there is a lot of sake that get’s consumed. At 1pm there is a small procession (on horse and foot, parading a mikoshi) leaving the shrine and making it’s way around the village.

It’s a very small festival, but i guess due to the sake drinking and all it does get very friendly and entertaining to watch and participate.

Transport: Kawaketa Mikabe Jinja is about 30 minute walk or a 5 minute taxi ride from Yokaichi Station, Omi Tetsudo Line.

Website: All i can find about it is this site here (all in Japanese)

Just noticed a new flavor of Fanta on the shelves in my Konbini mart. This time it’s from the Coca Cola company and actually tastes good! The drink has a slight yogurt flavor and there’s a lot of advertising on the bottle mentioning how healthy this drink is (probably a lie .. but who cares, you only live once!).

Calorie wise the drink is actually not too bad .. about the same amount of calories as a banana. I think i will have some more of that drink over the next couple of months! Yummm!

Omizutori is the commonly used name for Shunie, a series of events held annually from March 1 to 14 at Todaiji Temple. This collection of Buddhist repentance rituals has been held every year for over 1250 years, making it the one of the oldest reoccurring Buddhist events in Japan.

Omizutori is performed at Nigatsudo Hall, a sub complex of Todaiji, which stands not far from the temple’s main hall on the slope of a hill. Nigatsudo literally means “second month hall”, referring to the second month of the lunar calendar, when Omizutori has traditionally been held. The second month of the lunar calendar roughly corresponds to March of the solar calendar.

Among the many different events held during Omizutori, Otaimatsu is the most famous and spectacular. Just after sunset on every night from March 1 through 14, giant torches, ranging in length from six to eight meters, are carried up to Nigatsudo’s balcony and held over the crowd. The burning embers, that shower down from the balcony, are thought to bestow the onlookers with a safe year.

Unfortunately i arrived a bit late to Nara (heavy evening traffic) and struggled to get a good sightseeing spot. I suggest you get there about 1 hour before the event to get a good spot. The fire shower show only lasts for about 20 minutes before it’s all over and they do switch the lights off to make the red glow of fire look even better. If you like to make pictures than make sure you either have a tripod (although it does get very crowded so tripods are a bit difficult to setup) … or a very fast lens.

Transport: Take the train to Kintetsu Nara Station and from there you can walk (about 15 minutes) through Nara park to the Nigatsudo-Hall.

Website: Official website is the one of the Todaiji temple. Japan Guide however has an excellent article about the festival details in English (of which i took the liberty to quote quite a bit).

Hina matsuri is also called the “Doll festival” or “Girls Day” … It’s celebrated all over Japan on 3rd of March. Tradition has it that the dolls manifest some spirit after living for prolonged time in the house. And you can’t just throw them away in the trash or that bad spirit is coming back to haunt you. So instead of throwing them into the trash they are properly exorcised and blessed by a priest and set afloat on a boat and sent down a river to the sea, hopefully taking troubles and bad spirits with them.

People have stopped doing this now because of fishermen catching the dolls in their nets. They now send them out to sea, and when the spectators are gone they take the boats out of the water and bring them back to the temple and burn them.

The festival starts at noon and only lasts for about 2 hours. The Awashima shrine is famous in the Osaka/Wakayama region mostly for the dolls nowadays, but there are also other quirky collectors objects there (from frogs, tanukis, beckoning cats,etc ) and from around edo-period the shrine has become popular amongst women. The shrine was found back in th 3rd century  dedicated to the god Sukunahikona-no-mikoto (god of medicine and good health).  Women began to make offerings of their underwear to Sukunahikona-no-mikoto, hoping that he would cure them of karyoubyou (literally ‘flower and willow diseases’, a euphemism for STDs) and various other women’s complaints. I actually didn’t knew about this before going and wasn’t looking, but people say you can still see those items at this shrine.

Transport: Take the Nankai express from Osaka Namba station. Get off at Wakayama station, and change trains to the local bound for Kato. The shrine is about twenty minutes walk down to the shore from the station.

Website: The website of the Awashima Jinja is the official one and contains some small information about this festival.

The parents of one of my wife’s teachers happen to life very close to the Daigoji temple and kindly offered us a very conveniently located space to park our car during the Godairiki festival. The mother also went out of her way to surprise us with some fantastic tasting sushi o-bento after we returned from the festival – how very nice of her!

The family clearly loves motorbikes and a quick look into their garage gave us a look at a kind of bike that you don’t see every day! It’s a custom bike named “Zeus” made from a french company called “Side-Bike“. The engine is from Peugeot (which explains the Peugeot logo on the front) and the 2,000cc engine is actually located in the trunk of the side bike and not in the main-bike. I was told there are only about 50 of those bikes driving on the streets of Japan!

Some interesting facts about the bike:

• The bike seats 4 people (2 on the bike, 2 in the side car next to each other)
• the side-bike is air conditioned
• the back wheel of the bike also turns if you steer
• The bike is using a normal manual gear box to change gears
• the bike has a reverse gear
• if you use the bike on toll-roads, then you still only have to pay toll-fees for bike, even though the thing handles more like a car

The Godai Rikison Nin-o matsuri (or short just Godairiki) is held each year on February 23 in the nice Daigoji temple area. A mochi-lifting contest (open for anyone to enter) starts at noon and the goal is to lift up a heavy pallet loaded with mochi-rice cake for as long as you can. Women have to push 90kg and men 150kg. There are also other parts to this festival like the burning of used amulets and praying to the temples deity for protection against theft and other misfortunes.

Itsuki came along with me this time to see this festival. Actually she was planning on entering the contest, but we were about 10 minutes late for that, pity! It was a beautiful warm spring day (20C which is a bit unusual this early in the year) and a perfect day to go a bit outside the house. Unfortunately the festival itself wasn’t really much to my taste (got a bit boring after seeing 2-3 people lifting the thing) so we just had a short walk around the nice temple area (which happens to be a good sightseeing spot) and then left early for tea. The festival itself however happened to be quite popular, there were more spectators watching the event then i thought there would be!

Transport:  Take the train from JR Kyoto Sta., JR Line to Yamashina Station (6 mins) .. and from there take the Subway Tozai Line (8 mins) and get off at Daigo Station. Parking for cars is very limited.

Website: The Kyoto Tourism Website has some info on it in English and the Daigoji Temple website (all in Japanese) is of course the official website for the festival.