Daikannon and Kizuna Festival in Sendai, Miyagi.

6/10/2017

This weekend one of Cormac’s friends from Ireland was visiting Japan for vacation. This man’s name was Shane, and he was going on an extended vacation all around the world. He had just come from America; he had gone to New York, Las Vegas and to San Francisco. He stopped in Japan to see Cormac in Fukushima as well as go to Kyoto and Osaka later on.

I first met him Friday night and he joined us for our fun times that weekend. He is a cool guy and I was pleased to have him along.

We woke up Saturday morning with plans to go to Sendai. There was a big festival happening. It was called the “Tohoku Kizuna Festival.” The festival started six years ago as a way for Tohoku to pull together and create bonds to unite Tohoku after the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake that devastated the Eastern coast of Tohoku. As a result all the different Tohoku prefectures came together and created the Kizuna (Bond) Festival to show solidarity. The motto of this year's festival was "Passionate Kizuna Bonds Unite Diverse Tohoku." I got a plastic fan with this printed on it. The Kizuna Festival is a mixture of each of the major summer festivals from each prefecture in Tohoku.  That was the goal, but I will tell you about that when we get there.

A flier from the 2017 Tohoku Kizuna Festival.

A close-up of the Kizuna Festival logo, although this particular picture is from the 2018 event.

This flier showes some of the different events from each prefecture.

Before heading to the festival we decided to go to the Sendai Daikannon. It is a large Kannon statue in Sendai City where you can go inside and up most of the way.

We arrived and started walking around the base of the statue, taking pictures of the other shrines and temples around the parking lot and messing around.

Lookin' Fly As!

I have no idea what I'm doing, but I feel it.

From another angle, Pipe got a good one!

When you first get inside, you can see a few miniature models that show the outside and insides of the building, so it's easier to see how the building is built. 

You start off walking around the the outside of the lowest room. You walk clockwise around the center of the building, where the elevator and stairs to the upper levels are. There are also some smaller alters with many gold Kannon statues in the middle, but they were roped off and we could not go take a closer look. The circular room has dozens of statues lining the green walls. They were all different and all so pretty!

There are 12 statues made from a dark wood lining the inner wall that each represent one of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals. And there are many statues of Kannon cared in many different styles and personas. These are carded from a light wood and are painted in parts with many colors. It was so pretty! It was my favorite part of the Daikannon trip.

One of the purposes of this temple.

From here you are able to go up a short flight of stairs to go out onto the roof of the lowest floor, before you get up into the Kannon part of the building. We messed around a bit up there too.

From here we had to take the elevator to the top floor where it spit us out at a lovely altar. It is gold and ornate, yet less ornate than you typical Buddhist altar. It had large gold flowers in the front and a large fat Buddha to the side. It was a really pretty, rather unique altar.

A man who got to the top before us rubs the belly of the buddha. He also gave a short prayer after this.

You rub the belly of the Buddha for good luck.

The view from the top floor of the temple.

From this room you can go out and see the surrounding city from small windows in the walls. You can follow the path around the perimeter of the building which takes you down level after level of floors. At the floors you can take a path to an inner circular level where there are displays of Buddhas, Kannons, Monks and other demons and supernatural beings from Buddhism with the Hindu influences. I am not sure what or who all the beings are, but they were made from white stone and they all looked amazing. I’m sure my description of the floor layout of the building leaves much to be desired, so here are some pictures.

And here are some close ups of the statues that I found interesting. There's quite a few, but I liked them.

This one is seated on a dragon.

"On the catwalk, yeah
I shake my little tush on the catwalk!"

Do you even lift, Bro?

 

 

This one, when looked at from one angle, looks like the profile of a human head.

This Kannon is the patron saint of forgetting your sunglasses on a sunny day.

When we were done looking at all the Kannon and Buddha statues, we left the Daikannon and headed towards downtown Sendai to go see the Kizuna Festival. 

So an overview of the Kizuna Festival is as follows:

In the park there was a large Nebuta Lantern from Aomori Prefecture, and a large straw sandal from the Waraji Festival in Fukushima Prefecture. The sandal is 12 meters in length and weighs two tons! In the shopping district there was a parade that showed a lot of the traditional dances and performances that happen at the festivals every summer. 
Yamagata Prefecture a dance where a lot of women danced with straw hats that had five fake flowers on the top, called the Hanagasa Festival. 
There was a performance in the parade of the Morioka Sansa Odori Festival from Iwate Prefecture. This dance is said to be from a legend of banishing an evil ogre from Mitsuishi Shrine. 
Miyagi Prefecture had displays for Sendai’s Tanabata Festival hanging above the parade route from the ceiling of the shopping center. These are large, colorful displays of paper streamers and flowers in bulbous decorations. There was also a parade dance.
Akita Prefecture had their large lantern display on Sunday (so sadly we did not get to see that one.)

We started at one end of the shopping center with the parade going down the street. First thing we noticed were all the beautiful, colorful, paper displays of Sendai’s Tanabata Festival.

These signs are found all over Japan and they depict a horrifying monster abducting a child. The horrifying monster can be seen to the bottom left of this photo.

As we walked along the first parade performance we saw was the Morioka Sansa Odori Festival from Iwate. I took some video of the performance.

We continued down the street when we saw the second performance of the parade and that was the Hanagasa dance performance from Yamagata. The performance consists of women dancing with straw hats with paper flowers on the top, and bells inside the hats. The paper flowers are representative of Safflowers, the symbol of Yamagata. I was able to take video of that performance as well.

There was a third parade performance, but I am not sure if it was  specific event, but it may have been a Tanabata dance. Either way it was entertaining and I liked the music.

Cool building we passed in Sendai on the way to the park.

From here we started walking towards a park nearby that had a stage set up for dance and music performances. This park also had food and drink stands so you could eat while watching the performances. Sendai’s famous local food is cow tongue, so that is what our group got to eat.

I recorded a few performances at the park, although there were a few that I did not record. I especially liked the women’s group that did the taiko drumming.

There was also this group of women doing belly dancing (although it was quite tame and barely involved hip movements at all because: Japan. but it was still really pretty and entertaining.)

And this performance: Shortest. Performance. Ever.

After we had eaten our beef tongue we left the park to walk to a bigger park where they had the large Nebuta Lantern float and the large Waraji straw sandal.

The park was packed around the Nebuta and the Waraji, so I wasn’t able to get any good photos, but there was also this small,  bamboo lantern display that I thought was pretty. (All photos from this area of the part have disappeared.)

We wandered around a little more and saw a singing performance on a big stage and ate some more festival foods. It was here I found a churro and I was happy. I don’t remember anything about the performance on the big stage. I didn’t record it, I couldn’t see it and I was having too much fun socializing to really pay attention. But after the stage performance was over, it signaled the end of the festivities for the day and everyone started leaving the park.

As we were leaving I saw this large metal Kokeshi Doll statue in the park.

A little ways past the doll statue there is a retired locomotive train sitting in the park as well. Cormac once again let his inner 12 year old out, went into the train and started fiddling with the knobs and levers. We all followed suit because we are not real adults and we only need the barest of excuses to let our inner 12 year olds out as well.

A Bromance for the ages.

After we were done with the festivities we walked to a karaoke place nearby. We chose this karaoke place because it had an ice cream bar, and by that I mean, it offered small cups of vanilla ice cream to eat while you sang.

By this time of night my throat was hurting quite a lot and I lost my voice very early during our karaoke session. I still sang, but I sounded like garbage. But the great thing about karaoke is that nobody cares if you sound like garbage, everyone has fun and sings with you anyways. It is really such a fun time! I sang “Baby Got Back!” with Gabe, and Gabe can’t carry a tune in a bucket, and I sounded bad, but still we had a great time!

The lovely Engrish of a photo booth we passed.

When our karaoke session had ended we were all still in the mood for singing. Not Shane, though, He was still getting his ass handed to him by jet lag and he passed out in the back seat. And I was so tired, so we all decided to sing karaoke songs in the car on the way back to Fukushima City so we could all stay awake in the car. Shane slept through it all, surprisingly. I still couldn’t hold a note, and we didn’t even have any music to back us up, but it is honestly one of my more fond memories of driving at night.

I dropped Gabe and Felipe off at their apartment complex and I took Cormac, Shane and I back to Cormac’s place. We all crashed so hard. We were all exhausted and we had a bunch of plans for the next day.