Archives: Kitsune Matsuri

Kitsune Matsuri, Furukawa (Fox Festival)

Okay so I've been slacking with entries, but I figured most people were too busy to read them these days so I'll wait till theres interesting stuff to read about before putting them up.

Right, so earlier today we went to the fox festival thing in a nearby town (about an hour away). There were way more people than we expected, and we ended up following them around cause they seemed to know the festival route (had to follow the festival to different places all over town), guess they must be locals. There was the long walking parade at first, with people dressed up and carrying flame torches etc.
Main segment of the parade was the cart thing that had the fox maiden in it. The part was being played by a young girl and I felt sorry for her cause I noticed how she was squinting cause of how many people were blinding her with flashes from their cameras. She was being pulled around for almost 2 hours and there must have been over 1000 flashes going off in her eyes. Oh well.
While chasing the parade around, some paths people took were incredibly narrow and lined by weird fish canals all over the place. One guy fell in, it was awesome. Then again I almost broke my camera taking a shortcut. It involved jumping off a high wall. Whatever.
Afterwards we visited the stalls while the parade made itself to the stage.
At the stage they played out the traditional story which involved some pipe fox thing fighting the fox king or w/e, who was defending the fox maiden. This was after some marriage between the king and the maiden.
Lots of dancing and fancy lights, was good but we were at the back and couldn't see much, let alone take decent photos.
At some point during the night we got our faces painted, and cause Helen pestered I went back to get my camera before taking the bus. Photos will be up when I can be bothered, theres hundreds to sort through.