Where am I going? Who have I been?

After Chiba, I decided to go visit some matsuris.  "Matsuri" in English is "Festival."  People get decked out in yukata and other traditional clothing and wander about.  Okay, women and girls do.  Men for the most point wander around in t-shirts and jeans. 

That’s Japan for you.

The Kantou Matsuri is a festival of lanterns.  Men lift gigantic racks of lanterns (20+ feet tall).  My camera ran out of batteries, so I don’t have any good pictures.  But  Japundit does. 

Men clad in traditional happi coats carry 235 poles filled with a total of roughly 10,000 lanterns down the city’s main street. Each pole holds up to 46 lanterns on crossbars. The poles are 12 meters high and weigh 50 kilograms each.

I have footage somewhere of a lantern falling onto some powerlines, but don’t have access to it right now.

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