Explore everyday life in Japan
How and when do cultural practices begin? What spawns them?
In many cases, it's hard to know. Tracing their exact origins, especially in Japan, where many customs have been practiced for hundreds of years, can be difficult.
In the case of this festival, however, the Sentou Festival (千灯祭), which means 1,000 lights, the origins are clear. Seventeen years ago, a group of community leaders got together and decided to create a festival that would represent the vitality of the people and shops living and operating in what many still consider a dying neighborhood--a small area in an older part of Niigata City that has been losing stores, tenants, customers, and foot traffic to urban re-planning and sprawl for years and whose population continues to lean evermore toward being elderly.
While lantern festivals can be found all across Japan, what makes this one unique is that all of the lanterns are handmade by children from local nursery, elementary, and junior high schools, people living in nearby neighborhoods, and local businesses and shop owners. In fact, for the price of 100 yen (less than $1 USD), anyone can create their own lantern and display it at the Sentou Festival.
In recent years, as many as 6,000 of these lanterns have been created and displayed in various patterns along four blocks of a narrow one-way street. Many of these lanterns simply have pictures and designs drawn on them while others have thoughtful messages and prayers carefully written across their four panels.
If you go, it's best to take your time enjoying the sights and absorbing the atmosphere. This festival is often described in Japanese as slo-o-o-w, meaning that it is a festival that should be given the right amount of time to truly appreciate. The lanterns, and the designs they are displayed in, can be enjoyed from many angles. Their look and feel, and the light they give off varies considerably from early evening to night, as do the mood, age, and sobriety of the festival goers and the festival itself.
In other words, it's best too go a little early and stay a little late. There are games to be played, food and drinks to be had, thousands of lanterns to be inspected, and, perhaps, most importantly, there is an almost continuous stream of live, traditional music to be heard, which really makes the four city blocks where this festival takes place feel like they've been transported to another place or time.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.