More Chichibu Night Festival – Saitama

I didn’t get to the grand finale to the big Chichibu Night Festival that was last night, but here are more photos from the last part of the the warming up event. These huge festival carts are massively difficult to move and requires the combined strength of more than a dozen men just to steer it in the right direction. In order to turn it around you need even more people and some very clever levers, but I’ll post more photos of that later, taken during the day. Although it is called a night festival it starts in the day and goes on until nightfall, leaving plenty of time for visitors to get on the last trains back to Tokyo. The men in the gorgeous outfits are actually tied to the wagons, as they tilt quite heavily during operation and it would not be fun to fall of. I also expect they had quite a lot to drink in order to stand the zero degree weather. Just as the festival ended we actually saw some snow fall, unseasonably early in the winter for this part of Japan! More photos to come!