Gion Festival 2018

Hi,Everyone! It’s been for a while to post.
June & July past so fast and now it’s already August… can’t believe it.
Anyway, this time we would like to report about Gion Festival, which took place during July in Kyoto.

What’s Gion Festival?

We call it Gion Matsuri in Japanese, the festival of Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto
and it is one of the famous festival in Japan.
It takes place over the entire month of July.
There are many events during the festival but,the grand procession of floats (Yamaboko Junko) on July 17 is particularly spectacular.
Very enjoyable are also the festive evenings preceding the procession (Yoiyama).

Yoiyama

From 2 days before the Yamaboko Junko procession, most of the downtown areas will be the pedestrian zone after 5pm, and
you can enjoy festival music and beautiful lit-up floats.

Not only floats, you will also like food stands.

An Unique Float

Even though we need to slip through the crowd of people in heat,
We usually taking a walk to this festival every year to enjoy feeling Matsuri!
This time, we visited the Toroyama, a mantis float.

See? There is a mantis on the portable shrine in the float.
The mantis will move during the grand procession.

The unique thing of this float is ” Omikuji “, paper fortune.
This is not such as usual one, a moving mantis will get it in front of small shrine at the float and give it to you.

We are local in Kyoto but we do not know about this interesting fortune!
As you can see it,maybe there are more unique things for each floats which you have never knew.
For those who never been to Gion Festival, we will recommend you to enjoy it.
This is one of the fun event in summer of Kyoto.
(It’s walk-able distance from Kyoto Knot! 🙂

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