Huge Kites

Ready to Go
Originally uploaded by robizumi.

Hamamatsu has a huge kite festival. By that I mean the kites are huge... well the festival is huge, too. It seems like each neighborhood in Hamamatsu had a kite. There were more than 100 neighborhoods represented at this festival.

A friend told us about this festvial when we were camping and we decided to drive there and check it out. Hamamatsu, which is in Shizuoka prefecture, was about a 4 hour drive from our campsite. Which meant we had to get up at 6 in the morning to drive there. It wasn't too hard to wake up early since we were camping though.

The kites were amazingly huge. It seemed like they needed about 10 people to get them off the ground. It wasn't that windy but the kites managed to stay aloft. I was suprised. There were tons of people there, but most of them seemed to be affliated with a kite team. All of the team memebers had matching happi (coats) with the symbol that was on their kite. A lot of kites just had kanji on them but many had pictures of foxes, or samurai helmets.

When the moved the kites out to the field to fly them, they had a small parade. Usually this seemed to consist of old men holding the kite and small children playing trumpets and drums. It was pretty fun to see. Often you were just encouraged to duck under the kites instead of move out of they way.