Saturday was the annual Nagoya Festival, and man was it amazing. The picture above is of one of the bird men from the parade. I'm sure there's a more official name for them, but I don't know it. All I know is that they were colorful and probably my favorite part about the day.
The Nagoya Festival started in the 1950s, and goes for two days in October. There are various events, including marching band performances, dance exhibitions, and street performers set up through the city. I spent most of the day in Sakae, where the major Saturday parade ended. The highlight of Saturday's parade is the reenactments of historical battles featuring Nagoya's three featured leaders of the "Warring States period" (16th century): Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.
The man featured above is Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He stood out as the hammiest on in the entire parade, which in a show with battles, warrior maidens and hundreds of dancers, is saying something. He had a good eight or nine different poses in his repertoire, and the parade-goers were eating it up. All he did was look warlord-like and stand on the float, but for some reason I have five or six photos of him.
As is probably apparent from the photos, it was a really colorful event. You can't tell here, but this group of about a hundred women was actually made up of elderly women. They came around about halfway through the parade, at which point I was actively being jostled by the people around me. The setup for the audience was such that there were tarps, big enough to sit about three people deep, lining all the streets. This basically meant there was mortal combat to get grandmothers and small (and therefore short) children into these prime seats. I didn't sit down, but I was in the first row of standing people, which put me in between the people who wanted a seat and the empty spaces on the tarp. The somewhat painful lesson of the day was that shopping bags make for pretty effective weapons.
After dinner at Parco, my favorite department store, Jess and I took the subway to Osu Kannon, where there were street performers in the alley and performances at the temple itself. We caught the tale end of the oiran (female performers only seen by the imperial court in their day) show and took pictures. They then started processing through the alley:
After that, things took a turn for the less cultural. We stumbled onto one of the side streets, where there was some sort of wordless, avant garde play with a live, experimental jazz band accompanying it. I couldn't get any good pictures, but it involved women with six-inch-long fingers carrying around a samurai's bloody head and a near-naked man convulsing and speaking in tongues.
When that ended, we headed to the temple for the final performance of the night. It had been billed in my pamphlet as another oiran performance, but it turned out to be something entirely different. And strange. It was a set of six college students naked and painted entirely gold. Their danced for about twenty minutes —to what I think was an Indian song—while periodically gyrating and waving around torches. I still have no idea what this dance routine was about, despite understanding the introduction. I knew I would have a hard time painting a complete picture, so I took some video:
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