On my first visit to Japan, I spent most of my time in Kanazawa and I was fortunate enough to attend the largest festival of Kanazawa, it started from 3rd June, the day after I reached there and celebrated for three days, on first day, It is marked by a parade at Kanazawa station and is followed by a street dance of around 12000 people, it is so fascinating to see the people of all age groups performing their traditional dance. Foreigners also participate it in with full joy. All the roads are occupied with this massive group of dancers. I was happy to be the part of this festival, It was my first week there so I was not familiar of the Japanese people, but they treated my with love. <3

I joined them in dance, one of them taught me the steps and encouraged me to dance along them. It is a wonderful experience to know that Japanese people are so fit, even 80+ age of them were dancing effortlessly. Such people keep my believe in that I can always do better with my life and age is not a factor. 🙂

They were open for taking pictures with me, it made me comfortable. Though Japanese people are very humble and always ready to help but they are very shy and down to earth. So, you have to be the first to just smile or say “konnichiwa” and they will be nice.

There were also many food stalls outside the shrine, I enjoyed trying Japanese street food there. Starting from fruit candies, gyoza(dumplings), Okonomiyaki, yaki-soba and I do not know the names of many of them.

On the second day, lantern day (the Kaga-yuzen Tōrō Nagashi) is held alongside the river Asano, In which hand painted silk screen lanterns are floated from one end of the river near a bridge and to my surprise after the completion of this festival, people picked up all the lanterns back from the river to keep it clean :).

I really enjoyed this festival, if you plan to visit Kanazawa in June first week , I would highly recommend to attend this festival. You will get to learn many things about Japanese culture, people and food.

I hope you enjoyed the post.

P.S: Sorry for not posting anything from a long time, I have recently moved to a new city “Nagoya” in Japan and was busy in settling here and last few months were not good to me. I hope to share more experiences here.

Love <3

Yogu