Last Saturday was the big festival for Nakaniida, called “Toramai.” People dress up in tiger costumes and then dance around on rooftops. It’s big enough that it draws quite a few people from neighboring towns. The weather was perfectly sunny, almost hot. Excellent for kicking back with a beer and some yakisoba and watching the festivities.
The people in the tiger suits are my students. I didn’t think the photos really did it justice, so here’s a video instead.
Click to play the video (1.0MB). If it doesn’t play properly you’ll need to download and install the codec (xvid).
Um….WHY do they do that?
I saw the picture first and my immediate thought was “Whoa, that’s one ugly giant grasshopper up there!” lol
Well as to why they do it, I guess they’ve done it for a couple hundred years, so they keep doing it. Most towns here have some sort of festival unique to the area.
But they don’t have any tigers in your prefecture, do they? Maybe they did hundreds of years ago? (They do look like grasshoppers!)
They don’t have elephants either, but that didn’t stop them from attempting to sculpt them into the Tokugawa mausoleum.
OOPS, I thought they were grasshoppers too when I first looked at the picture before I read what you wrote.
Umm… yellow, with black stripes, a mane, and a TAIL? You must have seen some very odd grasshoppers as a child.