Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri 2008

The Danjiri Matsuri (held every year in Kishiwada, a city in southern Osaka Prefecture) is a huge festival, but it still somehow keeps a small-town feel about it (as opposed to the Samurai-Does-Vegas mood of Osaka City’s Tenjin Matsuri). After going there in 2003, 2006 and 2007, I went there yet again on the 14th, and took a lot of pictures. Danjiri are the large, wheeled, wooden portable shrines which are pushed and pulled through every neighbourhood of the city. The big fad among the girls in the festival this year seems to have been braiding their hair tightly. Someone who accompanied me remarked that, at times, it looked more like a Jamaican festival than a Japanese one, what with all the “plaits”.