Obon festival at Ebisu

Here is the Obon festival at Ebisu which was more commercialized and fancier than the one we attended last week.  It was also very, very crowded.  My understanding is that the Obon festival has something to do with remembering the dead ancestors of the people. You can see that this was set up with three levels; the top level had the drummers, the second level, the really good dancers, and the third level were just ordinary people dancing, some dressed up and some not.

 ( I hesitate to send too many of our pictures because you might think we are just playing all the time.  This was just a couple of hours that we spent there on Saturday night.)

Here are some of the ordinary people dancing at street level.

Here are some of the drummers up on top.

Here's some of the food they were cooking and selling.  You had to have been there to see the sights, the crush of people, and to smell all of the aromas of cooking food.



Here they are cooking cabbage to put with the noodles they make.

And more cooking

You just can't get a good idea about just how many people were there

This baby had the right idea

more cooking

Here are more of the people there, although later, the festival pretty much ended abruptly when it began to downpour rain.  Unfortunately, we forgot our umbrella and got soaked.  The people are always very orderly and quiet and polite even when they are in big masses of people, though.

Here are some sweet little boys at the festival

Anyone for food?

Here's Elder Chandler grabbing a bite of noodles and cabbage and red ginger and beef while walking.  We finally found a place to sit down, thanks to a nice Japanese man who set up some chairs for us.  A very nice Japanese lady wanted to know about my badge and what we were doing.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to communicate very much with her.  I have some pass along cards telling about the church that I will bring with me next time.  However, we are taking a few Japanese lessons here from a sister in the office, so I'm hoping to learn to communicate a little better next time.

Nothing better than a little squid on a stick.  I think we'll have to try that next time, at least I think that one of us will.  Would you like to guess if it will be me?  NOT! ( More adventures later.)