Japan Adventure: Final Neputa Festival!!

We watched our final Hirosaki Neputa last night, and we did the full on celebration. You see, people around here don't mess around when it comes to Neputa. They mark their positions early in the morning to be assured to get the best position. So early, 6:30am, we went out to stake our claim. In the picture below you can see our little green tarp marking our position for tonights festival. Also in the picture you can see that others have come even earlier to make their claim, even with chairs. How and why nobody steals or rips up the tarps to put theirs down is a mystery.

So just to make sure nobody took our carefully selected parade position, we went out to anticipate the parade at 5pm, 2 hours before the parade starts. We brought our dinner, mini-chairs, free-read-books, and games to entertain us during our wait.

Here you can get a visualization of our delicious dinner consisting of ham and cheese sandwiches, yamabudo (mini-grapes), clementines, spare-rib pringles, and chocolates--Yum Yum!!

For most of the evening throughout the parade we were joined by one of our English club students and her friend. We enjoyed getting to spend extra time this summer with her as she is our only first year English club member. Although conversation is broken, she is quite a trooper in speaking English, even when she figured out last night that Angie (but not Travis) could speak Japanese! Our little green tarp served as a staging ground for her "boy watching" although we highly discouraged it and attempted to tell her that the heart is more important than the face!

So finally to the highly anticipated Neputa parade! It was a night to remember with 3 hours of fascinating lantern floats, drum beating, flute tooting, and mini-cymbal crashing. Each float has a different hand painted design and they compete for the most creative and well painted of the city. In this picture you can see the front of the float, depicting a warrior defeating his/her foes.