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Japan Autumn Festival and the typhoon

This blog started on 11 March 2011, the day of the Tohoku Earthquake,with a brief e-mail entitled ‘I’m OK’ dispatched to close friends and family. The e-mail became a ’round robin’ and after a week it started a new life as a blog.

I’m an English woman living in Koriyama, Fukushima prefecture, a place no one had ever heard of, but which was suddenly being mentioned in the same breath as Chernobyl. Initially, this blog was a record of those first weeks, a record of how ordinary people, me and the 100 staff who work in the corrugated box factory I inherited, coped in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Sunday, 30 September 2012

Autumn Festival

  Hi

Koriyama has a summer festival but it’s a relatively recent introduction. The autumn festival, Aki Matsuri  秋祭り is the one that’s in people’s blood. The festivities went on for four days. Last year the children didn’t get to participate as radiation was still high. But they made up for it this year. The festivities culminated last night when 33 mikoshishrines from different neighbourhoods were carried up and down the main street and finally made it to the main shrine, Hachiman-sama. They were lucky with the weather. Tonight, Sunday, as I write, a typhoon has hit the Nagoya area and here the rain is lashing down.

The excitement of the Matsuri is the sound of the drums, the pipes and the shouting. Photos are a poor substitute. But here goes ..

All the fun of the fair – shooting gallery and yakitori

Day Three, Friday, was for the kids’

There are floats lit with lanterns …

… and underneath kids play drums and pipes. They’ve been practising for weeks.

more here http://annekaneko.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/autumn-festival.html

September 30, 2012 - Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized