Togitsu Festival
(Click on the image to enlarge)
We JASIN students were invidted to carry a portable shrine during the Togitsu Town Festival. I was excited to try this piece of Japanese culture. Of course I figured we just be givin this shrine, I didn't know we had to make it...
Building It
Since we were a group of international students we decided to use the American holiday Halloween as a theme for our shrine/float. We unpacked all our art supplies started working.
Motomi and Julien(the only Frenchman in Japan) discuss the artistic composition of large paper spiders.
The finished float. It took a lot of paper, glue, and markers to create, but Tasha shows us that the most important part is love.
The Festival Itself
These three model the festival wear we will be parading around in.
Children from Yoko Elememrety School are also carrying a shrine. When one of them saw my camera, a whole bunch gathered around.
Getting ready to begin marching around town.
They gave me a whistle, that's a lot of power for me. We walked a shrine all over town. Whenever we stopped, I would blow my whistle twice and we would raise the shrine and yell "wa-sho" although I thought it sounded more like "What's up?", which is what I yelled most of the time.
The Korean girls giving me bunny ears.
We stopped at a rest home and I was requested to pose for a picture with the residents.
It was already a full day by the time we finished. But my day didn't end there. Here's what happened afterwords...
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