Festivals in Kyoto

The Festival of Ages and the Fire Festival

October 22nd is a big day for Kyoto - two festivals happen on the same day. The first festival is Jidai Matsuri - the Festival of Ages.

The Festival of Ages (Jidai Matsuri)

The festival of Ages was introduced in 1895 to mark the cities 1100th anniversary. Kyoto was the capital of Japan from 794 AD to 1868 AD and this parade plays back those thousand years with precession of people in costumes. The parade goes in reverse order - the people you see first represent the Meiji Restoration (most recent) and then goes backward in time. There is a web site for the parade.

I was most impressed by the soldiers. They are carrying what look like traditional weapons, and have authentic looking armor. Even the foot ware looks period - no one is wearing sneakers.

And after every period is the bureaucrats.

The whole parade (2000 people) takes more than an hour to walk by. We were quite close to the end of the parade route so some of the people looked pretty tired.

Fire Festival (Kurama-no-Himatsuri)

The fire festival isn't actually held in Kyoto - it's in a small town named Kurama. To get there you take a Eizan line train from a Kyoto station - the trip takes about half an hour. By the time we got to the station (around 6pm) the train were already packed and lines stretched out of the station.

The festival was started 940 AD when a local shrine (Yuki-jinja) was moved from Kyoto up to Kurama. The locals (they generally are wearing costumes or sashes) build and stock large fires at the side of the road. This town is pretty much a one road town, running next to a river with houses on each side of the valley. When we arrived the road was separated with a rope and the spaces at the rope were filling up fast.

Shortly after we arrived, we started to see torches walk by. These torches were carried by the younger members of town. The torches are made of woods and are carried by 3 to many people.

The main event is carrying 5 huge torches from the city square to a fence. These torches are heavy (50 kilos) and carried by three people. As people try to put them up (they aren't very stable) other people throw water onto the torches and people to keep things sane. As we tried to walk to the train station, one last surge of the crowd pinned us against a shrine. Thankfully we got an amazing view of the action (we could feel the heat of the torches).