Sanja Matsuri

I forgot to post about a very exciting time I had! It was the night before I went to Disneyland, so I think the excitement of that knocked the other excitement out of my head.

I went to Asakusa for Sanja Matsuri, which is one of the biggest, craziest festivals in Tokyo. It's an annual event that lasts three days; I wish I had been able to go to more of it, but I didn't know it was happening until the afternoon of its last day, so I was only able to go for the evening. It's in honor of the three men who founded Senso-ji (see previous entry) and a lot of it revolves around three portable shrines, or mikoshi ("Sanja Matsuri" translates to "Three Shrine Festival").

On early Sunday morning, the three mikoshi set out to visit all of the districts in Asakusa, and then they return in the evening with much celebration. That's what we went to see, and it was very exciting! There were a ton of people there, of all sorts (a sumo wrestler walked past us!), and while it was kind of gross being smashed in that crowd, it was really awesome too. At one point, these dudes rushed at us to, like, part the crowd so they could get to the temple. They were yelling and people were freaking out and we totally could've been so badly injured; I probably should have found it scary or gotten annoyed, but it was mostly just exhilarating. Later we pretty much got carried along with the crowd (and two of us got separated from the other two people we were with) all the way down Nakamise-dori (the vendor-lined street that leads to the temple from the big famous lantern) almost to the temple. One of the portable shrines was not far ahead of us, and we were right behind this float thing that had people playing music on it, so it was super cool. And then we got blocked in by police tape and totally saw some drunk dude, like, getting arrested! Excitement!

Afterwards, we went to Denny's.

(Most of my pictures are a blurry mess, due to the lighting and the jostling of the crowd, but a couple turned out. I include pictures of the cute representation of the event we would soon see that popped out of a nearby clock on the hour, a mikoshi heading toward the Kaminarimon [notice how the lantern is folded up; this is to allow for the huge crowd that would pass beneath it], and the music float - and mikoshi ahead - going down Nakamise-dori.

And an extra bonus video of a couple minutes of our journey down Nakamise-dori. Enjoy Japan, moving picture style!)