Today was Obon, one of the biggest festival days in Japan. There was
obviously nothing to see from the onsen itself so we went into town
for it. We were planning on walking down at 3 or 4 for the festival
which was supposed to start at 7, but our host needed to run errands
regardless, so she offered to bring us along. We got into town around
3 or so and started looking for a plausible lunch before festivities
began. Almost everywhere was closed for the holiday, only 2 places in
the whole town were still open as far as we could tell. We ended up
going to a family restaurant by the river, which was pretty great.
The dining room was basically the dude's living room, the whole place
smelled of cigarettes, and there was random wrestling and other
memorabilia everywhere. I got a solid bowl of ramen for like $6.

After dinner we wandered the far side of the river for a little bit 
while we watched the rain clouds gather. By the time we got to 4:30 or
5 the rain had began in earnest. We sat in the cover by the visitor
center and waited. It was actually a question whether the festival
would be postponed but a bit after we crossed the road to buy some
beer the rain let up and the event could begin. It opened with a dance
then a shamisen, which was really impressive to hear in person.
During the shamisen performance we got caught on local tv. It ended
up kinda horriby awkward because at first I thought they just wanted
us to say hi, but they held on us. Not asking questions or anything,
just holding. Then once the camera wandered away one of the women on
the crew started talking to us and asking questions, very odd.


The obon fox after the gathering had began        /japan/images/obonfox_reduced.png
The approach of the melons down a darkened street        /japan/images/obonmelon_reduced.png
A while after that the shops began to really open up. There were only
a handful of stands, all selling food. Noodles, takoyaki, korokke,
and yakitori. A little bit later, once the sun went down, they started
moving the whole stage into the street and people started gathering .
Obon is an ancestor worship festival, though with the US influence
(I think?) it's taken on more features of our halloween, namely the
contemporary costumes. Practically the whole town showed up it seemed
like, we'd guessed somewhere around 400 people in attendance with
costumes ranging from Miyazaki to Disney movies to furries to one
huge group all dressed up as slices of watermelon who paraded down the
main street.

The stage from which everyone was called        /japan/images/obonstage_reduced.png

Unfortunately after all of the groups had been introduced it was
getting towards time to meet with our host again, who'd offered to
drive us rather than us walking 90 minutes or so home uphill in the
dark. We hit up 7Eleven real quick for drinks and dinner and walked
outside of town since all the streets in town had been blocked off for
the festival. A lazy night after that mostly, but the spring was *HOT*
tonight. Like 50+ degrees C. I could feel myself cooking, but in a
relaxing way.

I was pretty exhausted by the time that we got home, we ate some
snacks for dinner, shared sake, then I went and passed out.

When I have time I need to upload some pictures, but I'm writing
this on a train the next day and we don't get the JR East wifi
here, meaning no way to transfer photos from my phone.

By the way, I also brought my little point and shoot camera on
this trip. I don't know if I'll retrofit them into posts but
expect a *lot* of images in the gallery after I'm home. I
didn't bring the transfer cable here with me.

I've decided to post the reduced versions of pictures because they
look cool and use less bandwidth. I'm also posting the full
color, resolution reduced versions in the images directory
too, if you want those. I don't hate the host of tekk.in
enough to post the full resolution 8mb files, sorry.
.