(For some reason the pictures aren't loading right now, and all of the commands are in Japanese, so I really dont have and idea whats going on, but I'll try to post pictures of the festival in the next post. Read on if you have incredible patience.)

Well, I spent last weekend at a Japanese jinja (Shinto shrine) to take part in the omatsuri summer festival. When my host mom first explained it to me, I thought we were just going to spend the day at the festival and then go home. Obviously, though, the language barrier proved too mighty in this case, and suddenly I found myself sitting in a car that was being driven by a Shinto priest (I don't know the Japanese name for a priest, so I'll just refer to them in English). Unbeknownst to me, we would be spending the night at the shrine; I was actually pretty excited when Takuya explained it to me. I ended up going with Takuya and a Swedish exchange student named Patrik. Luckily, Patrik speaks fluent English, so I had a faithful companion along the way.
When we got to the town (which was about 2 hours away from my house), the priest showed us around the inside of the jinja and told us where we'd be sleeping. Over the course of the weekend, we spent most of our time hanging out with the Shinto priests in an awesome Japanese-style dining room, feasting on really good wa-shoku (Japanese food). Patrik was pretty shy, so he didn't try to talk to the priests that much, but I had a good time trying to communicate with them. Takuya, Patrik and I also were allowed to watch the ceremonies of the festival, which seemed pretty exclusive (nobody from the outside was invited in, from what I can tell). At night Patrik and I went around looking at the various stalls, getting plenty of stares from all of the Nihon-jin. It was a good time.

The next day, we woke up at 6 a.m. to the sound of loud firework-esque booms. For the rest of the day, Takuya, Patrik and I took part in the omatsuri procession. Basically, all of the Shinto priests and some other dudes dressed up in kimonos and follwed this mini-jinja that was on the back of a truck. The procession went around the town of Zenibako, and from what I could tell there were predetermined stations where people of the local enclave would round together sacrifices to make to the shrine.

So, we spent almost the entire day stopping at what must have been at least 30 locations collecting these donations of sake and other foods. Every stop, we all got off of our bus (if the previous destination was far away from the current one) and began a 5 minute-long prayer. It involved bowing and clapping...towards the end I started to catch on. Overall, the procession was really cool for the first two hours or so, but by the seventh and final hour we were all starting to get pretty tired, the Jinja-men included. I felt especially bad for these cute little girls who had to perform a dance at every stop, because they were either sitting in the back of a pickup truck or doing their dance for the entire day. Overall though, it was a really cool experience and I learned that Jinja priests are really cool and friendly.