Obon is finally here: the Japanese summer national holiday celebrating the buddhist festival of the dead! Obon is a time for festivals and traditional celebrations, but it’s also a time, for non-religious people, to just get a vacation with family and spend some quality time with your loved ones. Last night, Sam and I went to the Ikebukuro obon festival. Usually, the festivities are on the days surrounding 15th August, and in most places this is the case, but luckily as I was leaving work yesterday, we saw Ikebukuro was doing early celebrations! So, we watched the traditional dancers and drum players live, as well as most of the crowd joining a larger outer circle to copy the dancers moves at point throughout the 2 hour period. There were beautiful colour lanterns hanging from strings, illuminating the night sky and, honestly, it was the best way to start our first obon here in Tokyo.
Today, we’ve taken our first day trip of my obon vacation from work. During this week Sam and I plan to explore 5 more prefectures of Japan, starting with Saitama. In Saitama, we went to Kawagoe, (otherwise known as “Little Edo”,) and the Railway Museum.
Starting the day in Kawagoe, we walked around the beautiful town and did some shopping (which entailed getting yet more coffee beans haha as well as finally finding Sam the perfect pair of much needed soft yet secure sandels). The pictures of this place really don’t do it justice. I also wanted to note that I wanted to take better photos, but our dslr has unfortunately died on us, after 8 long years of hard work. We will look to see if we can get it fixed at some point, but so that we can take photos this week, we acquired a second hand Canon 7D online, as this is comparable to our much loved sweet 100D who is currently out of action. The 7D should arrive either Monday or Tuesday, so hopefully we can take some nicer photos this week, but for today at least, my silly little phone camera will have to do. Sorry in advance for the quality of these photos.
After Kawagoe, we went to the Railway Museum. It was really difficult to get tickets, as the website didn’t indicate where to get them and the convenience stores organise these tickets into weird categories which are hard to differentiate. We got there in the end though, bought our tickets in advance, picked them up, and made our way there with our little picnic. It was so much fun! Highly recommend a trip there for anyone in the area, particularly if you have a family because there’s so much for all ages to do! (But beware of the gift shop! There’s so many nice things that you may end up spending way too much money on things you love but definitely don’t need!)
We were going to head to Lake Town Outlet after the museum, but it had already been a long day, so we’ll go there some other time. I’m now sat on the train home, half falling asleep, trying to write this blog for you guys. As usual, I’ll drop the pictures below for anyone who wants to see them, and thankyou so much if you follow my blog and end up reading them this far. Means a lot. I’ll update you this week on our other outings, so stay tuned!
-Alice
