This POTW is of the Kounomiya Naked Man Festival, an annual event held just after the Lunar New Year, a calendar that Japan used to follow until the post war years. It’s not often I post an image from my agents website, but it’s there, and more information on the history is on this blog.
NAGOYA - JAPAN, 7 february 2009: the naked man festival (hadaka matsuri) was held. this annual event began in the year 767ad, in the nara period. the event is held to removed bad luck and bestow good luck on the people. the event this year attracted 180,000 spectators and 12,000 (naked) male participants.
This is an annual event, and I was able to attend today. Here is the first of many photos that will be available on my Asia Photo Connection and PhotoShelter portfolios.
Suzuki’s new concept car that is reportedly able to achieve a stunning 32km/l, albeit with a 800cc (0.8lt) turbo charged engine. It looks great, but it looks like an angry cartoon character… an Angry ‘Zuki?
It’s two years since the first blog post. The website was already a few weeks old, but it took a while to design and finalise the website, and then must up a few words for the first official blog post… nothing sensational though. The first important post was to promote a set of photos of Tado Gagaku, a traditional court music group playing Sino-Japanese instruments in traditional garb. This little blog has come a long way since then. See more of these at my agent’s website: Asia Photo Connection by Henry Westheim.
A performer of Tado Gagaku playing the sho (cheng)
This Photo of the Week is especially for the editors who are preparing months in advance, I hope this one doesn’t come too late. This is the annual Naked Man Festival, which is held in the depth of winter, usually in early March. Yes, it can be snowing, raining, icy, you name it, and this event is still held. Here is an extract of some information I wrote earlier:
It began over 1,200 years ago, in the year 767, when Nara was the capital of Japan. At that time, there were plagues affecting the Japanese people, so Emperor Shotoku ordered special prayers to be said nation wide. The governor of Owari Province (now Aichi Prefecture) asked the shrine at Kounomiya to do something about this, and to remove the bad luck. So, the Naked Man Festival, held in the coldest time in winter
My New Year’s routine is to go to a local Buddhist Temple to see in the New Year and take my turn to toll the bell, and then to a Shrine to eat warm oudon and drink my first (and usually only) sake for the year, and in the morning to see the first sunrise. I went out really early in the morning on the 1st January 2011 to get sunrise pictures. It’s not my preferred subject, but it’s special to Japanese people, to send New Years cards that feature a sunrise, especially the first one of the year. We send Christmas cards, they send New Year cards to their friends. That day I took a friend out with me to take him to see one of my favourite sunrise pictures ever, which I happen to have taken. Unfortunately, we were about 500m too far to the left, and so we missed getting the sun rising through a local amusement park (see link for that picture). As a consequence and with some irony, I just photographed on anyway, shooting the rising sun with a smoke stack / cooling tower in view.
Every time I’m out there alone I wonder what the year will bring, what will happen in the coming year. Will it be exciting or uneventful? On the 1st January 2011, the first day of the new year there was hope, optimism, potential for everyone in Japan. Below is a video of the photographs I took to commemorate the day of a new and potentially exciting year, a year that many would rather forget, but will always be remembered. There was too much irony for me to ignore these photographs.
My best new year photos are on my agent’s website, Asian Photo Connection by Henry Westheim, and here is a search for “Japanese New Year“, and many of those photos (including the boats, dog, etc) were taken on 1st January, 2011.
Sunrises are often used on New Year cards in Japan
On Saturday late afternoon I went to Yokkaichi Port. Apparently there are great industrial night views to enjoy there. Well… you only live once. Below is a sample of the ‘you only live once’ photos, and more have been submitted to my portfolio at Asia Photo Connection, so they should be there soon. Please check them out and buy them.
Some facts about Yokkaichi and Yokkaichi Port.
Yokkaichi is a major international container port, shipping well known Japanese products like the Honda cars, flash memory, tea, ceramics, and more to San Francisco, Sydney, Hong Kong, and other destinations in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. It was established as a “modern city” at the end of the Meiji Restoration, at the time of when the Emperor was reinstated as the ruler of Japan (construction of the port was completed in 1899). In the 1960′s many people suffered “Yokkaichi asthma”, due to the toxic pollution emitted into the air by the oil refineries and factories. Yokkaichi receives much of Japan’s oil from the Middle East and some of it is refined there. Still today, many Japanese and foreign residents joke about the air quality in Yokkaichi, especially since a lot of electricity is generated in that area by combustion, including the burning of household and office rubbish and imported oil.
The photos from this year’s Stone-bringing Festival (Ishidori) are available at Asia Photo Connection. The Stone-bringing Festival is an event that is probably over three hundred years old. I’ve written about this before (Tag: Ishidori), and there is also some good information about Ishidori on Wikipedia. I’m making this information available for free in the hope that you’d find it useful and would buy my photos. Which reminds me, buy my photos.
Radioactive food is becoming a real and hidden concern. The discussion of this is veiled and brief on NHK TV news, the national broadcaster. One might assume that NHK is avoiding promoting a food panic. Already prices for Hokkaido dairy products are increasing. Previously in this blog, radioactive mustard spinach, a very popular part of the Japanese menu, was discovered growing in Tokyo weeks after the 15th March explosion, and in mustard spinach imported to Singapore from Shizuoka (south of Tokyo). Now some people are concerned that rice being grown in the north may be mixed with uncontaminated rice grown in the south. According to NHK, already, rice stocks are low, as many people are stocking up ahead of the harvest season beginning now. A friend of mine went shopping in Nagoya city with a dosimeter (a radiation measuring device) and found that cucumbers in his supermarket had high levels of radiation. I wish I could get a dosimeter, they are so hard to get.
Rice and mustard spinach are pictured below.
Rice shortly before harvest
Ishidori is the Stone-bringing Festival, an annual Shinto event held on the first weekend of August. It is reputed to be the loudest such festival in Japan. It is not well known, but a very lively festival, and perhaps a best-kept festival secret. The festival apparently dates back to over 300 years, and involves more than 30 portable shrines representing each of the wards (or towns) within Kuwana City. Photos for this festival are being processed and should be available soon at Asia Photo Connection.
