One of the best times of year in Japan is the New Year holiday season, called O-shogatsu. This is the main holiday of the year for the vast majority of Japanese, and far and away the most enthusiastically celebrated.
On New Year’s Eve, having spent the day with family, perhaps watching the famous...
Itsukushima Shrine’s Chinkasai Festival is held every December 31st, providing a show visitors are unlikely to forget. The festival is intended to protect both the Shrine and the town from disastrous fires, a real concern where, traditionally, close-set buildings were constructed largely of wood and...
Otorii gate in the sea before the shrine. A large wooden ball is placed on a platform and hung from the scaffold by ropes. As the festival begins young men, mostly from the island, enter the water wearing only loincloths. At a signal, the platform bearing the ball begins to swing, rise and dip crazi...
The Kangensai Festival is Itsukushima Shrine’s most important event of the year, with roots going back to Taira no Kiyomori’s reconstruction of the Shrine in the 12th century.
Kangen is instrumental music, as opposed to accompaniment for dances, performed on the wind, string and percussion instr...
Bugaku is the ancient repertoire of dances of the Japanese Imperial court. Derived originally from dance forms imported from China, India and Korea, they quickly became thoroughly Japanese in mood and effect. The dances are divided into “dances of the left” and “dances of the right.” Each set of dan...
