Takayama Festival

On October 9, we went with Steve, Zelie, Matt, and Chelsea to Takayama, which is a city 2 hours North of Gifu, for one of the most beautiful festivals in Japan. This festival is held every autumn to give gratitude to the god for the harvest. The festival began with the parade of the floats. It takes all morning for them to navigate the floats around the town due to the narrow streets and large amount of people. Throughout the city, there are large storehouses used to store the floats during the year to keep them in their best condition. The floats were very impressive, but there were so many people at this festival that it made it hard to enjoy.





After the parade, we went to the temple to watch a dragon dance and the opening ceremony.



We also spent some time looking around the city...which was beautiful! Takayama has a really nice river that runs through it and many traditional shops and restaurants.




This is a very popular bridge that's famous for taking pictures on.




Throughout the mountains and roads in Takayama, we saw many "tanuki crossing" signs. This is a Japanese animal that is half dog and half raccoon! Tanukis are known for their extremely large testicles and are considered a symbol of fertility. A lot of businesses and houses have tanuki statues outside to give them good luck.

Here is a link all about tanukis!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanuki



Here is a picture of real tanukis we got from the internet. Unfortunately we haven't seen any yet.


At night, they hung lanterns on the floats and once again paraded them through the streets. It was beautiful to watch, but still hard to see.