4/6 Daimyo Festival

It was very short notice, but I found out the weekend of that there was going to be a major festival downtown. It was the "Daimyo Parade" and if you don't know what that is, a daimyo is basically a feudal lord who ruled a Japanese province from the 15th century until the Meji Restoration in the mid-1800s. Of course, everybody in the parade was an actor. The daimyo's actress is supposedly a semi-famous actress and many people were excited to see her. Anyways, I met up with some of my classmates from Ehime and Matsuyama. We all waited, and watched the procession. Eventually, someone I knew walked by. It was Saki, one of the middle schoolers who visited Sacramento. There were many people dressed in all sorts of clothing, we saw geisha, ninjas, soldiers, etc. Towards the end were the ones everybody wanted to see, the princess and the daimyo. You can see pictures below.

As they passed everybody followed them into the main shopping street Okaido, and the parade continued with more groups. What I didn't know was that there would be many yosakoi dance groups from not just Ehime but Kochi prefecture as well. I love yosakoi because they dress up very nice and dance with a high-intensity. While we were standing there watching, I saw some of my classmates from Matsuyama and they brought over a new student from the UK named Sharon. I brought the new American student from Lodi named Jeremy. 

After that we headed over to the Matsuyama Castle Park where we were able to get "lunch" from snack vendors and watch more performances on the main stage. There were many awesome performances that I have included down below. While we were watching, the girl from earlier, Saki, came up to us all excited that we were able to watch and took a picture with us. We said adios and I met my classmate Ahmad from Malaysia and he introduced me to his classmate. Since he was new, we decided to climb up to the castle while we said goodbye to the rest of my classmates. We got some specialty ice cream and enjoyed the view. I made it back to my cherry blossom coated dorm just before sunset.