Festival Time

Well, its festival season in Japan. One thing about Japan is that they're crazy about festivals. Particularly during the summer and fall, you could easily go to a differnent festival every weekend. There are salmon festivals, garlic and beef festivals, blossom festivals, apple festivals, cherry festivals, etc, etc, etc. I've always been one to avoid festivals...not because they're not interesting, but because I've never been a fan of crowds. But, we attended a couple this weekend and and it was pretty fun. The first festival was the annual Misawa city festival. It consisted of alot of folk music/dance performances, food booths, and a couple of parades. The ice cream guy...

A little drum major...

Why does the fat kid always play tuba?

His World of Warcraft username is HannibalTheAnimal128.

The kids' fave...

The next day, we took a trip to Aomori City to check out some shopping malls. We didn't intend to go to any festivals, but ran into this one on accident. There was a set of perfoming groups who appeared to be competing with eachother.

The groups were mostly women and young girls with a few guys mixed in. They were doing an action-packed, martial-arts style of synchronized dancing.

They were all dressed alike and performing when...

Blam!!! They'd flip their outfit and all of a sudden, be in a different colored outfit. As I said, there were several different group performances, and the outfit changing thing was common among them all.

There uniforms also consisted of umbrellas, fans, etc. The dance routine was pretty amazing in itself. But more fascinating was a part of the performance behind the dancers...

Each dancing group had one or two guys in the back with these gigantic flags. They were waving them around along with the music and it just sent chills down your spine to experience it.

To stand there and wave such a huge flag took a ton of strength and balance.....

and a badass hairdo...