Hokkaido Shrine Festival

Wednesday through Friday of this week, Sapporo has been busy with all kinds of activities surrounding the Hokkaido Shrine Festival. From what I have read, it's a traditional Shinto (Japanese religion) festival hosted by the local shrine. Matsuri (Japanese word for festival or holiday) typically include parades of elaborate floats and mikoshi (probable Shinto shrines - Shinto followers believe these serve as a vehicle for transporting a deity while moving between a main shrine and a temporary shrine during a festival, or when moving to a new shrine). Also found at matsuri are many colorful booths selling food and trinkets as well as games for children (one of which is "goldfish scooping" - I can't believe I didn't get a picture of this!!...for 300 yen / a little less than $3, your child can use a ladle to scoop/catch 3 goldfish from a tank swarming with them and collect their catches in a small bowl before dumping them back into the tank). The Hokkaido Shrine Festival had all of this to experience and more! The food stalls and games had a very similar feel to walking around a fair in the US. It's been a fun filled couple of days taking it all in. Prepare yourself to be bombarded with pictures...

Fiona and I decided to start our festival experience by visiting the food and game stalls set up both across the street from our building in Nakajima Koen and near Hokkaido Shrine. We've done quite a bit of sampling over the last few days!!

This thing we were very excited to try - as we watched the preparation, it looked like we were basically going to be getting an elephant ear in ball form on a stick. Unfortunately, that didn't turn out to be the case. I've searched and searched trying to figure out what this is, but I can't seem to find it. The best way I can describe it is like fried bread on the outside, but uncooked dough in the middle. We didn't love it, but that could have been mostly because I went into it fantasizing about elephant ears...

Cucumbers on a stick! We didn't get one of these because Mommy's still thrifty even in Japan and knowing that we had a whole bag of them in the refrigerator at home, I couldn't bring myself to pay almost $4 to have one served up on a stick!

Oh boy. These things! Fiona LOVED them and I couldn't get over the fact that I'd actually eaten one. The sign at the stall had cartoon chickens all over it so I THOUGHT I was getting little chicken nuggets. Instead we ended up with battered and fired chicken skin!! She can't stop talking about wanting to get more!

Ahhh...finally something recognizable and comfortable!!

There was stall after stall of grilled seafood and meat on sticks - we saw octopus, squid, pork, chicken, and other things we didn't recognize.

In the end, we went for the yakitori (skewered chicken). It was deliciously grilled, but again, I could have done without the skin and again, Fiona loved it!

Next up, was more fired potato - this time much cooler looking than boring ol' French fries. These are whole potatos, spiral cut and put on a skewer before they are fired on order. There were about 10 different seasonings to chose from after they came out of the frier - all written in Japanese. I pointed to one that looked like salt and got lucky!

Last, Fiona finally got her dessert that she'd been dying to try for days. The chocolate covered bananas did not disappoint!

By some stroke of luck, I even managed to order her a dye-free version!

After all the eating, it was time to check out some of the other festival activities. Yesterday we caught the parade of floats and mikoshi. There were all kinds of interesting traditions (Fiona has so many questions that I just can't answer no matter how much googling I do - I'm finding much of the information even on the web is only in Japanese, so my searches often don't result in very detailed information), and traditional music, dance, and dress.

Looks like the pooper-scoopers in Japan don't love their job anymore than the ones in the US!

I've searched and searched, but can't seem to find any explaination as to what the white powder is that this guy was tossing as he walked...

There were also several trees like this one being carried in the parade, but once again, I haven't been able to find any information on the significance.

Several boxes like this one were carried along the parade route. Sometimes it looked like people were tossing coins in, but other times people like this man threw in pieces of paper...

Below is one of the mikoshi (portable shrine) that we saw. What's amazing about this is that while some mikoshi can weigh as much as one ton, they are carried solely on poles resting on the shoulders of 20-30 men.

Following the mikoshi were elaborate floats, each topped with a different larger than life sized "character" (for lack of a better word) that would literally rise up from inside the float. Some looked like Japanese princesses (maybe?), others like warriors, and still others were pretty scary looking - almost like demons. Below these were women dressed in traditional attire playing music and dancing.  

After the parade, we headed over to the Hokkaido Shrine for another traditional festival activity we were told about - a monkey show! I'll warn all you animal lovers out there to stop reading now. I have to say that I felt bad for the performing monkeys, but was impressed with what they could do nonetheless.

This guy had some serious jumping skills!

Taking a bow...

Playing the cymbals to the same rhythm that was whistled by the trainer:

Oh yeah, and he could walk on stilts!

Really tall stilts too!

She was seriously over the moon when she got to shake hands with the monkey!

That about sums up our three days of festival excitement. It's been so fun to experience local events like this...we rarely know what anyone is saying, but it's still been a blast!