Asakusa Star Festival

Today was a special kind of day called "Tanabata Matsuri" or commonly known as the Star Festival. It came from China. Tanabata means "Evening of the seventh". In Chinese Qi Xi means "The Night of Sevens". The kanji (Little Chinese symbols) is the same. People celebrate this day by dressing up and hanging wishes on a bamboo trees at a local temple. Then at night they're put on floating lanterns and floated down the river or they just burn them.

The tale goes that a couple in the heavens fell in love. Orihime (The weaving princess) made clothes and Hikoboshi (The cow herder) herded cattle. When they started seeing each other they got lazy. The cows roamed freely rarking shit up in the heavens and the angels started getting cold cause of a lack of warm clothes. Tentei, (King of the heavens and the princess' father) got pissed off so he separated them one on each side of the milky way. The princess cried and cried so he let them see each other just one day a year. This is on Tanabata, The evening of the seventh. The day lands somewhere around July the 7th to the 13th. The day is accurate, it's just that the Gregorian Calendar that we all use is just wrong. But its always on the 7th lunar day of the 7th lunar month, every year. Not many people know the tale but I like to think that the lanterns contain love letters representing the stars sent across the river called the milky way. That would be an awesome thing to celebrate. Unfortunately its celebrated for more material reasons along the lines of people wanting stuff, writing what they want and hoping they get it, along with shops making a killing off the crowds that flock to them.

A few dress up in Yukata.

Shopping madness.

Even with advertising on the main temples!

With a lot of hustle and bustle I managed to see a few cool things. People come to the temples to pray, flinging money at the money boxes asking in their minds for stuff like good health and good spirits and that sort of crap. Sounds like gambling to me. Its all in good spirit though, but people get pissed off if you "blaspheme" like me.

Entrance to the crowd.

A not so important temple.

Soaking up fire on a stinking hot day.

Coin throw and pray competition.

These temples that the people throw their hard earned money at are surprisingly full of gold and gold ornaments. The construction is beautiful. If you take a look underneath the structures, you'll notice that they're actually quite modern, even with electric toilets. There's no temptation to rob these places cause it's real bad luck to do so. The spirits will hate you, even if you get away with it.