Tohoku Festivals - Warriors & Dragons!

I’ve spent this week in the northern most part of Honshu, known as the Tohoku region.  It’s high summer here, so like many places in the US, it’s festival time.

Akita (yes, home of the dog) has a lantern festival each year.   No, it’s not a parade of people carrying fancy lanterns.  It’s a parade of teams of people who alternate holding up a “tree” of 42 paper lanterns each lit by a candle. Topped by the Japanese flag, the tree extends 20-30 feet into the air on a series of bamboo poles.  It sways gently in the wind, sometimes carried but more often balanced on someone’s hand, shoulder, or head.  (You may be able to see this in the picture on the right). 

I got to watch a preview one afternoon at a weekend festival, and then again at night.  The town was celebrating the opening of a new community plaza, formed at the junction of its new Akita Art Museum by Tadao Ando, community center, and shopping building.  There were drummers and dancers, food and music, including a young Japanese woman belting out “Rolling Down the River” in a great American accent.  It was much fun, particularly watching the men balancing their lantern trees on their heads, and hearing the roar of the crowd as the trees swayed precipitously and sometimes fell.

Hirosaki has a lantern festival, too, called the Neputa Festival, but it is a procession of large paper fan-like lanterns, complete with warlike figures on one side and lovely ladies on the other. (I didn’t understand the Japanese explanation.)  From the brochure of the museum I visited, it’s a stately somber parade. 

 
Aomori’s Nebuta Festival, held at the same time as Hirosaki’s, is fun and grand.  There are dancers in front and drummers and fifers in back of each huge three-dimensional float of paper tigers, dragons, and warriors.  The festival has been around in various forms for decades and now is the largest one in Japan.  The festival is next week, when I’ll be in Sapporo, but I got to see some of the floats under construction, a museum that houses last year’s floats and showed how they were made, and another museum that has some of the older floats.

A hand under construction

See how big the float is!

It was really interesting to see how the floats are made.  Each starts with a drawing of fantastical figures.  There is a basic wooden skeleton, then thin wire that gives dimension to the shapes. Paper is glued on top, and an individual artist paints the figures (apparently the artists compete with each other for best design).  Light bulbs have replaced the candles that were used to illuminate the paper forms.  The entire float sits on a solid wooden frame that also holds a generator to power the bulbs, and this all sits on a couple of tires.  The whole float is pulled – and turned around – by a lot of people. 

The floats are amazing.  There are fierce tigers and dragons and lovely little birds and butterflies.  Most of them are in a traditional warrior style, though I did see a small float of Sponge Bob in this year's array.  It looks like this year’s parade will be like many others – lots of fun, lots of noise and music, and lots of people around this parade of gorgeous lantern-floats.