Parade Martial Law.

I just returned from the parade (okay 7 hours of drinking after the "parade" but you get my drift.) I never seen more people accumulated in one ever spot to witness a complete non-event. Rumour has it that an actual parade did occur somewhere but from my vantage point, nothing was to be seen. Granted, I can't read a map to save my life so I can understand being out of the loop wrt the parade route, but how does that account for the 100,000 other people in the same boat? Hopefully one of my pals did in fact snap some pics and I'll link to them later, but for now all I have are pictures of hordes of people anticipating a parade that was not to be...

Starting with an extremely packed subway, I had to wait until the next car to even be sardined into a car. I bet all those visitors from Tokyo who decided to get away from the crowds felt pretty silly tonight.

All of the following images are of masses of the populum, I kept expecting huge trucks to show up scooping them up and hauling them away. Soylent Green is Japanese people!!

The only action I got to witness were of the occasional ambulance or fire truck inching its way through the crowds.

Apparently there were about a million people in attendance and the city was SO unprepared for it that they didn't block off cross traffic until 2 minutes before the parade in my location and even then the organizers had to cancel 2/6 of the festivals because it wasn't physically possible to showcase them in the parade!

But regardless of all the chaos, I had a wonderful time watching the people wandering about willy-nilly looking for an actual parade and drinking the 4 beers that I'd wisely brought from home. I asked a couple of old ladies to guard my spot while I went to pee and there was NO more beer except for the non-alcoholic sort, what's the point? The old ladies survived their King-of-the-hill ordeal so I gave them a grape juice. Shortly thereafter, they as well as thousands of others gave up.

After the grande melee had subsided, I wound my way down Jojenji and managed to snap a few pics of parading participants and several shots of Tanabata streamers (that were NOT corporate owned!)

While searching for a post-parade pub, I espied this lone piece of footwear which reminds me of my favourite Holland joke. "I'd like to go to Amsterdam, wooden shoe?"



Unfortunately, it's taking ages for these pictures to download and the sun is beginning to rise so pics of the streamers and after-parade party will have to wait. I'm downloading these a day later so I can add a few more pics. These are the only clues I had that a parade had actually taken place. No idea what they were doing or where they're from but I managed to get some evidence of a parade.

I don't know what occurred here but it's a pretty funky shot!

These were a few more glimpses of paradeers.

Ya know when I typed in 六魂際パレード RokkonSai into YouTube, this is what I got. Even more evidence that there was NO parade. (Mute first...you've been warned.)