Issaki Hoto Festival

Whoah! These last two months seem to have slammed past with the force of a typhoon. It's about time I started catching up on the end of this summer. It's been a month since my last entry and a lot has happened since then. I'll start from where I left off and work forward from there. The weekend after Jon-Mark, Karen and I hiked Tateyama was exactly a year after my arrival in Wajima. Last year, the weekend after I arrived in Wajima, I attended my first Japanese festival, Issaki Hoto, in Wakura. Tower higher than the two story buildings, the giant kiriko lanterns were carried by approximately 100 (very drunk) men each. Hot-Ishikawa describes the festival, "This is one of the biggest and most lively summer festivals of Noto where spirited men from the area around a fishing town called Ishizaki parade through the streets bearing Kiriko lanterns. One of the attractions of this Festival is the giant Kiriko lantern which is 15 m high and 3 m wide and weighs almost 2 tons. It takes 100 men to carry it and parade it through the streets. As the men shouldering these giants lanterns dance and parade through the narrow streets, the 6 giant Kiriko lanterns dance with them. As the skies get dark, these lanterns are lighted up and they create a fantasy like atmosphere. The Festivals continues till late night as the firecrackers light up the skies and as the climax nears the Kiriko look even grander as the competition among 6 giant Kiriko bearers becomes fiercer."  It was so good I went back for round two this year and met some interesting characters along the way. That and my camera was broken last year, so of course I needed a redo. Karen and I met the very drunk Japanese man pictured above while buying beer from a cooler stand. He demanded that we only speak Japanese and use no English. After harassing us on a couple of beer-purchasing occasions, he invited us up to his family's or his friend's second floor suite to watch the kiriko procession. Up until then I had always been jealous of the people who were able to watch the festivals from a comfortable birds-eye perch. After a few minutes up there though, I was ready to be back on street-level where all of the nitty-gritty action was taking place. From Wakura Onsen Matsuri The festival was just as lively as I remembered my original experience. The next day I headed to Hakui for a three-day summer English seminar with high school students from all over Ishikawa. After that I was off on a whirlwind road-trip across Hokkaido, but I will blog about that another time.