Last week was Golden Week, an annual string of consecutive National Holidays which makes for about a week off of work. One of those days is Children’s Day, and the locals in Echizen have an interesting way of celebrating: they fight each other while carrying a golden shrine on their shoulders. It’s one of my favorite festival events of the year, so I wanted to show some of the activities to you.

Let me start with the story behind the battle. Echizen is home to the shrine dedicated Kawakamigozen, the goddess of papermaking. (Echizen has been a major papermaking center for centuries). Like most shrines, once a year, the gods and goddesses are taken out of their main shrines to visit the smaller local shrines around them, and then to spend a good portion of the year up in a mountaintop shrine, deep within their natural surroundings. The Otaki shrine, the head shrine for Kawakamigozen, does this on Children’s Day every year. Continue reading →