JapanGirl64

 This weekend we got tickets to see the September Tournament for Sumo Wrestling. It was held at Ryogoku-Kokugikan in Tokyo. All along the sidewalk outside the venue are banners that represent the different wrestlers. People were standing by certain banners and taking pictures, but we couldn't read any of them.  What an totally unique event! I loved the traditional clothing the tournament officials wear. Many of the Japanese spectators also had on traditional clothing. The arena was set up just for Sumo Tournaments with "mat seating" in the lower sections. (We sat up high in the Western style seats). The matches go by very quickly - taking only about 20 seconds (if that). We arrived around 1:30pm and watched 5 or 6 of the lower ranked matches. After the lower matches concluded the Intermediate matches began with a parade/ceremony of the wrestlers in that group. We stayed to see one of those matches but we had not eaten lunch so we left the arena to grab some food.  Found a...

 For the Labor Day holiday we decided to visit the other side of Honshu - the Sea of Japan side - destination city Niigata. Seeing the sculptures at the Wara Art Festival was the main attraction for this trip.  In prior years students from a university in Niigata put on the festival by building several giant sculptures made from rice straw left over after the rice harvest. (Niigata is famous for growing rice) We had seen pictures of the sculptures in prior years and they looked very big and really cool! Sadly however, this year the festival only had 3 small scale sculptures (due to Covid - huh?). They were...ok.... but hardly worth a 4 hour drive.  But the good news is we did a lot of other things on our trip and overall it was totally worth the drive! On Saturday we drove from Camp Zama to Nagano. Our first stop was to visit the Zenkoji Temple. It was built more than 1,400 years ago and is believed to have first Buddhist statue ever brought to Japan when the religions wa...