This was the weekend of festivals. Actually October is the month of festivals. It is the time when everyone prays for good harvest of their crops for the year.
We have been looking forward to going to the Nada fighting festival for a VERY long time and it had finally arrived. We were lucky enough to be invited to sit in some seats with one of the teachers from my school. Not many people are privileged enough to ever see this festival let alone be able to sit in a seat. We were provided with lunch and were very well looked after. It was fantastic!
My teacher and his friend with us
The shrine entering the temple area - it was that heavy that the men were having a hard time keeping it up right.
This festival is quite dangerous and every year there seems to be a death so I was glad to be sitting high up in a seat - PLUS we had a really good view from where we were sitting. The Nada festival was held over two days. The first day was mainly seeing the shrines come out one by one.
Each area has it’s own colour where they wear bandanas and hold pom poms to help distinguish their area. The men carrying the shrines also wear a fundoshi (similar to sumo wrestlers) so we got to see a lot of butts over the two days. It was fascinating to see how enthusiastic the people carrying the shrines actually were. These shrines were a lot bigger than the previous ones I have seen so I can only imagine how heavy they would be. It was kind of like gladiator with all the action happening in the arena below the spectators. I was happy not to be in all the comotion down below. At the end of the day all the shrines came out at once - all seven of them and kind of paraded around the arena. Some of the shrines almost tipped over because they were so heavy. It was quite scary watching as you really felt that the people holding the shrines were going to be hurt. At night the shrines even lit up which was really nice.
After this we headed to Oshio where the lion festival was taking place. This was also amazing and we were lucky enough to see the procession of the lions entering the temple area. It is said that if the lion touches you on the head you are to have good luck. I was really hoping that I was going to be touched on the head by the lion.
I guess I was lucky enough.
The procession
We were even lucky enough to meet Miss Himeji and have a photo with her.
The next day at the Nada festival we were lucky enough to be able to sit in our same seats. This time we got to watch the shrines fight each other. It was very exciting but scary at the same time. There were three old shrines pretty much just ramming into each other. Every time they rammed into each other they would fall over. Spencer got right into the crowd to get a closer look - can you spot him?
The man and his wife who let us sit with them
Can you spot Spen?
We watched the fight scene then headed to the mountain to see some more. Can you imagine being in the middle of all of this? Check out the amount of people.
As we were walking there we stumbled across some men who wanted us to wear their areas colour which was yellow so they gave us each a yellow bandana and we had a photo with them.
We then got to the hill but as we had no seat we had no idea where to stand. We tried to find a safe spot and ended up the hill a little way. When it was time to leave we realised that to do this we had to walk through the whole shrine area.
Well this was quite terrifying as we were kind of stuck down there and at one stage I thought that we were going to be squashed. Well we managed to stay safe and we ran across at the right time. I was glad to be out of the crowd I can tell you that much for sure. It was a really fun and interesting festival to spectate but I can see now why there would be deaths that occur from it. I am really glad that I was able to experience such an exciting, scary, enthusiastic, colourful festival.
