Aoba Matsuri Part 3, Parade

Now the last two posts about Aoba Masturi were as close as I come to being scholarly, but I have no more information to offer, but a lot more photos, so that's all you're getting in this post!

Dancing down Clis Road, the main shopping street in Sendai.

Firemen holding up a ladder...

...ready for some acrobatics

Date Masamune

John being made useful

Mayoress of Sendai

Suzume Odori band

The Japanese 7 Lucky Gods on their float. I like Ebisu, the one on the left with the fish. He seems to really love his fish.

Masamune's fight for Sendai, re-enacted by high school students

Aoba Matsuri Part 2, Suzume Odori

As I mentioned before, Aoba Matsuri is the second biggest festival in Sendai. Apparently it's origins go right back to the 1600's when the Tosho-gu Shrine was built in Sendai. Then it was held in September and involved people from about 70 smaller shrines bringing Yamaboko (floats) to Tosho-gu.

It started to become more like it is now in in 1874, when the Aoba shrine was built. The festival was moved to May to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Date Masamune, the founder of Sendai. Although it has had periods of being more or less popular since then, it was renewed with vigour in 1985, the 350th anniversary of Date's death, and has been very popular ever since.

Probably the most important (certainly the biggest) part of Aoba-Matsuri is Suzume Odori. Suzume Odori means Sparrow dance, and it supposed to date back to the building of Sendai Castle in 1603. Allegedly, a group of stone masons from Osaka drunkenly burst out with this dance. The idea of a group of burly stone masons spontaneously bursting out into a very feminine dance seems rather unlikely to me, but obviously the idea of the modern man hit Japan a little earlier!

Now, children all learn it at school, every Sendai workplace seems to have a Suzume Odori club, and there are lots of fun clubs too. They perform at pretty much any event they can, but Aoba Matsuri is the biggest deal. Most of Saturday was dedicated to a Suzume Odori dance competition, and there were apparently around 3000 dancers in Sunday's parade too.

A video of the dancers in the parade

NTT Docomo (a mobile phone company) had a group of dancers, including one wearing this scary mask!

A Sendai sweets maker had all their dancers dressed in pink. I'm guessing this was every little girls favourite!

They'd been dancing for about 5 hours by the time they got to us (not counting everything they'd done the day before), so most of the children (and some of the adults) were less than enthusiastic!

Aoba Matsuri Part 1

Springtime in Japan is Festival time. As usual, there are plenty of details about the general way Japanese festivals go on Rurousha's blog. As you'd expect though, all Japanese festivals differ a lot. 

In Sendai, the main festival is actually Tanabata (which takes place in August, over my birthday :D), but the second biggest one is Aoba Matsuri. It took place last weekend. It takes place over both Saturday and Sunday and feels really like a British summer carnival.

Unfortunately, both John and I were working on the Saturday, but we went into Sendai after work. We bought some beers, went and watch a few dance performances and played some games. It was fun. Here are some photos. We went on Sunday too, but you'll have to wait for those photographs :)

The floats were put to rest along the pedestrian walkways overnight.

Baton twirlers. They were good, but none of them smiled at all. It was rather depressing!!

Our first time of watching the Sendai Sparrow Dance. More details and a video in the next post!

Performers watching other performers. Because it's such a big scale thing and so many people are involved, there are loads of people just wandering around dressed up in gorgeous costumes.

Japanese fairground game, part 1. Catching goldfish. Keep what you catch.

Pretty wagon, for photo opportunities!

Changing rooms. Bit prettier than the stripy tents that'd be set up back home!

Japanese fairground game part 2. Sumo wrestling cardboard. You hit the table to shake your opponent's character out of the circle. I won because I'm awesome, and because Date Masamune (founder of Sendai) is better than OnePiece character :D