Koenji Awaodori dance festival

The summer festivals continue and this weekend we visited the Awaodori dance festival in Koenji, Tokyo. According to the official website it is the second largest Awaodori festival in the country, at which a staggering 12,000 dancers perform on two evenings. As expected, there were large crowds, but it wasn't too difficult to find a good spot to view the parade from, and the atmosphere was fantastic.





Saving the best for last:

Matsuri in Asagaya

This weekend we visited a street festival in Asagaya. Asagaya has a quite long glass-covered shopping street that takes a good 10 minutes to traverse on a normal day. As you can see by the crowd below, this was no normal day! The entire length of the street was heavily decorated with lanterns, banners and large paper mache cartoon figures. There were a handful of videogame characters, but they were relatively poorly made compared to this pink bundle of joy.

This is a very common sight at a matsuri. Using a paper "net", kids try to scoop goldfish from a large tank to take home. The paper easily rips when wet, so they must continue to try using the edges of the paper.

Finally! I got to see some stag- and rhino beetles on sale. These wrestling beasts are summer pets for Japanese kids. Admittedly it's difficult to see, but there's a big one feeding at the front, just to the left of the metal ring.

Also on sale were this singing Long-horned Grasshopper, hermit crabs, white salamanders, turtles and crickets.

Of course no street festival is complete without excessive amounts of food. Here scallops and squid-on-a-stick are being sold.