Kakunodate – Samurai Houses

Kakunodate, a small town in northern Akita prefecture is famous for two things – their cherry tree lined river bank and their well preserved samurai houses, bukeyashiki. There’s quite a few surviving samurai houses spread around the country but nowhere is there so many as here in Kakunodate. Most of them are still privately owned by the old samurai families but several have been opened to the public or serve as cafes, restaurants or shops. It’s a great chance to see how the warriors of Japan lived in private. It’s easy to get to the city since it’s a stop on the Akita shinkansen line, right between Morioka in Iwate Prefecture and Akita City.

More Akita Kanto Festival

Some more photos from the Akita Kanto Festival team visiting the big Furusato Matsuri at Tokyo Dome last year. Accompanying the team was of course musicians, including taiko drummers. These are photos from the parade as the poles and lanterns are carried around the arena. At the Furusato Matsuri (meaning the “home town festival”) famous festivals from all over Japan take turn entertaining the audience, when I was at the festival it was this team from Akita prefecture, and also Awaodori dancers from Tokushima prefecture and dancers from Okinawa in the south. It is held every year in January, over several days in the huge Tokyo Dome arena. Recommended!

Akita Kanto Festival Performance – Furusato Matsuri

Every year in August up in Japan’s northern Akita prefecture there is the traditional Aktia Kanto Festival, a harvest festival that uses long bamboo poles with painted lanterns in amazing balancing acts! The poles and lanterns (that are lit at night) weigh about 50kg each, but of course there are even heavier, I have heard of some that weigh about 80kg! These are held in one arm, or balanced on any part of your body that you can think of, and carried in parades. As part of their tourism drive, a team of festival performers travel to Tokyo a few times a year, so although I have never been to Akita I have seen performances of this festival a few times. I took these photos at last year’s Furusato Matsuri at Tokyo Dome, a huge baseball stadium between Korakuen and Suidobashi stations. If you have free time in Tokyo today I recommend visiting the event where you can sample food and drinks and festivals from all over Japan in one handy spot! The daytime tickets are probably nearly sold out now, but the night time tickets are even cheaper, so even on a budget it shouldn’t be too expensive. I’ll post more photos of this amazing festival later on, but please excuse the poor photos, I was using a 50-500mm “Bigma” Sigma, the original widow maker and back breaker tele zoom lens. Absolutely not suitable for indoor photography!

Namahage Demon Masks

In Akita, in the north of Japan, there is a peculiar tradition on New Year’s Eve. In villages and town across the prefecture local families will be visited by scores of demons, dressed in straw rags carrying buckets and weapons. These demons will do their best to scare the children of the family into promising to behave and not be lazy. I have never seen this tradition in real life but in Aoyama earlier this autumn I got to see a few of these demons dressed up for action! I can only imagine the terror experience by Akita children, but everyone I have ever met from the prefecture was perfectly pleasant and hard working so maybe the demons actually work! They are called Namahage (生剥), which fittingly comes from the name for the burn you get if you are lazy and spend too much time under the heated tables, the kotatsu, in winter.