Time in Japan

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Fall Festival

Here is tengu mask. You can't really see it, but the nose is really long. Tengu are supernatural beings in Japan. They are demons, but not necessarily bad ones. It depends on the tengu, I guess.









Here is some carving on the temple.







This nice lady and her daughter agreed to be photographed. You can see the difference between a very young girl's kimono and a married woman's kimono.










These dog balloons appear to "walk" on their paper feet. They sold quite well.




Here is the procession going into the temple. After this, the head priest chanted a sutra and some prayers.

This is the mikoshi. I think every temple and shrine has one, and they are carried around during festivals. Later we passed this group going down the road.

Here are the men with the tengu masks.














Here you can see the shoes the men with the masks are wearing. They don't look like fun!














Here is the little girl in her kimono again.















Some fall color....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay, couple questions:

1. Is there some overall theme to the fall festival? General harvest type of stuff? Holy day? New year? Bowl game? Post-Hallowe'en hypoglycemic crash?

2. What is a mikoshi?

Me said...

The festival is for the resident Tengu, I think. The mikoshi is a portable Shinto shrine.

The fact that there were Buddhist priests and a mikoshi at the same festival shows how well Shinto and Buddhism play together in the Japanese sandbox

They were forced to be separate when Shinto was the state religion, during the WWII period, but in general have been seen as complementary to each other.