Koinobori Matsuri Children's Day

This Seven Eleven next to hibiya koen had a cool(er) design.

this is an italian statue. i guess this wolf or whatever saved these miniature human babies from starving, but still its two mini humans suckling on multiple wolf teats while doing russian kick dances, come on. its in hibiya koen

Koinobori matsuri in Sagami Hara. it took 1.5 hrs on the train and then 30 min on a hot bus to get here. Koinobori are these Carp streamers that they fly on Children's Day which should more accurately be called boys day because its for thems boys. So legend has it that a carp swam upstream to become a dragon which is literally what the name of these things is. A carp where, and why? who knows.

some of these things are 10 feet long, and i have seen ones as tall as a house which you will see in the next post.

finally went to this place in Omoide Yokocho next to shinjuku station. it has a rickety rooftop but its so cool because this little crappy oldschool area of shinjuku has survived amongst the sky scrapers so you kind of feel like Carl in the pixar movie up when his house is the last little oasis of non modernity.

um if i could spend $25 on something it would be a giant fish head with rice.

so this actually happened at Fumikas house a few days later but im posting it here cuz it has to do with Chilren's day. This Kobuto is displayed on children's day cuz its for boys and its manly or something.

its also really heavy so for an 8 year old whose head its supposed to fit its probably like wearing a bowling ball bonnet.

and it def doesnt fit on my adult gorilla sized head.

you eat these on children's day too, you dont eat the leaf. its mochi with redbeans inside. How many different ways can you have ricecake with redbeans? apparently an infinite number of ways in Japan, too many for me to count already.

Fumika's parents are too nice and super genki so they proceeded to bring out the Hinna Matsuri dolls, which is AKA girl's day. so this is for girls, the prince and princess or something. they are expensive as is that samurai helmet for boys day, something like $1,000. Fumika said rich girls have more expensive ones in the thousands of dollars and have a lot of them. If you don't put these out on Hinna matsuri day your daughter won't get married.

the trade off is your daughter will be freaked out by these things staring at her for a week.

that is the end of today's cultural lesson messed up by me.

1 comments:

mr. pineapple man said...

my japanese teacher told me that shes still single (shes like over 40) because her parents were lazy and didn't put away the figurines after children's day haha! loving the post :)