May has been a fun month for festivals this year!
After having been cancelled due to COVID in both 2020 and 2021, everyone was very excited to welcome back the Mikurumayama and Kenkayama festivals this year. The first one was semi-cancelled due to rain (they brought out the floats for us to look at but couldn’t do the full parade), but the other one was held in full and the energy was through the roof.
I’ll start with the Mikurumayama Festival, which is held in downtown Takaoka, about 15 minutes from my apartment.
You can read about the Mikurumayama in a little bit of detail here and here, but the gist is that the first of these carts/floats was a gift from the founder/lord of Takaoka City to his townspeople about 400 years ago. Now, the main event of the festival is a parade of 7 such floats (one for each of the neighborhoods or districts of the city), each with a distinct golden figure on top.
Pictured above is the float with a rooster on top. The butterfly is the topper for a different float, but it hadn’t been placed atop the cart yet yet ( I guess, it’s too heavy to stay up there year-round). You can also see me standing in front of the bottom bit of one of the floats. The wheels are as tall as I am and decorated beautifully with gold leaf.
This past weekend was Kenkayama. It also features people-powered carts as the main event, but instead of focusing on the beauty, they actually charge down the street and ram them into each other. Each time, they do a bit of a skit where the “leaders” of each cart talk to each other and decide whether they have resolved their differences or if they need to go a few more rounds of fighting. Usually they continue in sets of 5 collisions, or they just say “one more!”
Eventually, the leaders walk (carefully) across the battering rams of their respective carts and shake hands, signifying the conclusion of the match and, I don’t know, world peace.
It’s also in Takaoka City, but in an area called Fushiki rather than downtown. I couldn’t find a good link with English information, but here‘s an ok one.
I realize I’m not going to get an Travel Blogger jobs with those photos, but it’s the best I could do. I took some videos, which you may have seen on my Instagram, but I can’t post them on this blog unless I upgrade to premium.
If you’re interested and have a bit of time on your hands, you can skip through this video of the festival a few years ago. You can see the leader having a conversation about going ONE MORE ROUND at about 29:20, and you can see them make up at about 29:50.
It’s so much fun to be there, and you can feel the ground shake when the carts collide. There’s also a hint of danger, as there have been injuries and a fatality or two during this festival in the past.
I had some yummy festival food (karaage and fried cheese at the first one, and fried soy sauce seaweed potatoes and yakisoba at the second), and I also got a few souvenirs (hand towels patterned with illustrations of the floats, a sweat band, a mask, and some stickers that the vendor threw in for free).
It was so much fun! I’m glad that things are finally starting to be un-cancelled, and I look forward to experiencing a bunch of new things this year.
Alisa & a Visa 