Saturday, July 25, 2009

Tanabata Festival

My blog's been a bit lacking lately. Sorry about that. Haven't have much of interest to write about for the past week or two. Today, however, was the Tanabata festival in Misawa. You can Google search if you want to know the Tanabata story and purpose of the holiday, but the basic idea is to celebrate the one day of the year when two separated lovers are able to come together according to the story. It's a day of happiness and wish-making. It was celebrated here with a DOZENS and dozens of food vendors, decorations, performances, and kiddy games in the streets of downtown Misawa.

Among the offerings were sausage lollipops. We chose to eat some yakiniku (grilled marinated meat on a stick) and delicious Gyros instead. If I had a bigger stomach, I would have gotten sooo much more food. Everything looked and smelled heavenly!
And of course, no festival is complete without Harry Potter decorations:

2 comments:

margaret said...

Very interesting posting! Good to see something new here! Wow - sausage lollipops. And Harry Potter in a traditional Japanese...hanging thing. What great intercultural intermixing. By the way, is the new Harry Potter movie playing around there somewhere? Is this holiday only in Misawa, or throughout Japan? Great pictures!

Patty said...

Harry Potter 6 is playing here, and in fact we saw it opening weekend at a Japanese theater (the movie was in English with Japanese subtitles).

And there are Tanabata festivals all over Japan during this time of year, but different places celebrate different weekends, there's no specific date for it.