Toramai
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).
May 2nd, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Um....WHY do they do that?
May 7th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
I saw the picture first and my immediate thought was "Whoa, that's one ugly giant grasshopper up there!" lol
May 8th, 2006 at 8:12 am
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.
May 8th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
But they don't have any tigers in your prefecture, do they? Maybe they did hundreds of years ago? (They do look like grasshoppers!)
May 9th, 2006 at 8:24 am
They don't have elephants either, but that didn't stop them from attempting to sculpt them into the Tokugawa mausoleum.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:50 am
OOPS, I thought they were grasshoppers too when I first looked at the picture before I read what you wrote.
May 10th, 2006 at 8:23 am
Umm... yellow, with black stripes, a mane, and a TAIL? You must have seen some very odd grasshoppers as a child.