Wa Shoi! = what shrine carrying people say!!

IOU one hot springs post because I have something else to write about, yay! Yesterday was a festival in Edogawa (where I live now) that they have only every three years. It’s an ‘omikoshi’ festival. It’s really one of those words that doesn’t have a decent English translation but ‘portable shrine’ seems to work for my dictionary. I would bet some of you have seen one before, it’s the kind of thing they would show on a travel show or something. What it is, is a shrine placed on top of a frame made out of long thick wooden supports. And what do you do with the supports, carry the shrine of course! Every possible part of the wooden beams are placed on top of someone’s shoulder. Anyway, this is all very exciting because I got to take part in the festival and help carry the shrine! We were a little late getting changed into our shrine carrying outfits (seen below) so we didn’t start until 9 am. There were about 6 different shrines that I could see. Our shrine had a decent group of probably around 100 people. We all took turns carrying the shrine. It was really fun and really heavy. Being taller than some of the other people, the beam kind of made itself at home digging into my shoulder. But the short people had it worst because the shrine kind of bounced on them; my older host sister has dark bruises from where the beam hit her shoulders. We carried the shrine all over and people on the sides of the street would throw water at us, so we were soaked and pruning all day. They even had the firemen out spraying us. We got free food which was so awesome (I had a bunch of Mister Donuts donuts!!) I stayed away from the KFC, I think I wrote about that awhile ago. I think my host Grandfather thought I was scared of Japanese chicken because he started talking about American beef and how chicken is fine and beef is bad, it was funny. Anyway it finally ended at 4 o’clock, I had no feet by then. The shoes we had to wear were these two toed things. They didn’t have my size, so the ones I had were a bit tight. I’m not wearing them in the picture but some of the others are. So that was my festival experience! And tomorrow I’m off to Kyoto! I’ll be back in a couple of days, probably postponing my onsen story. But I’ll have Kyoto stories instead!