Last week Ian and I went to the famous Soma horse festival held in northern Fukushima. Sorry I didn’t get these posted earlier, but I’ve been busy. And lazy.

We met up in southern Sendai and then drove down to Soma. Although we missed the parade, we got to see the cool part: people in full samurai armor with flags racing horses. I think most of them were pretty inexperienced, because in most races one person fell off their horse halfway through. Nobody was seriously hurt, but in every case the horse kept running the race along with everyone else… and then kept running after the race finished. Apparently the people on the ground had zero experience with horses, because their idea for stopping the rampaging equine was to stand in front of it and wave flags, in some sort of attempt at equestrian semaphore. I think we can all agree that’s a really stupid idea. In one case there was a miscue and the next group of racers came out on the circuit before a stampeding horse ran out of steam. Instead of getting out of the way, some of the riders tried to block it in. Predictably, there was a collision, and the horse got up and just kept running. The situation resolved itself when the flag waving idiots directed the horse into a crowd of bystanders. I’m not making this up. But the flip side of this was that the same sense of danger gave the event some real excitement, kinda like Ben Hur and the chariot race. Maybe that’s not the right analogy.

But in the end it appeared that nobody was seriously injured, and they proceeded with the next part of the festival: capture the flag… on horses! Well, it wasn’t QUITE the same thing. They fire four flags up into the air with cannons and the samurai-garbed riders have to grab them. Judging by the competition the winner probably gets something really cool, though neither Ian nor I could figure out what. And then they do it again. And again. And as it was hot and we were sitting on a rather uncomfortable grass slope and we’d seen the best part anyway, my esteemed colleague and I jumped in the car and shouted hi-yo Silver.

I had a lot of fun with this photo

Which one is going to fall off?

They seem to have a different definition of “capture the flag” than we do…

Ian snaps off a beautiful portrait of a farmer on the way back home

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