Category: Urban Essays

The second Fukuhaku Tanabata Lantern Festival

August 8, Saturday, a lantern festival was held from Fukuoka City Hall to the Nakasu area. Last October’s Hakata Toumyo Lantern Arts Festival was supposed to be bigger, but it wasn’t a success because of a typhoon. We knew this August one would be a little smaller but we went earlier than usual. There had been strong rain in the afternoon so we hoped for no more rain in the night.

Beside Hakata Riverain, when it still wasn’t dark yet, there was a traditional drum event performed by kids. Red, orange, yellow, light blue, and white bags were prepared with sand (to weigh them down) and a candle each, and set out here and there along the riverside or by the building. We thought ‘Did the bags have bright colours like this before?’ But perhaps they would have a different atmosphere in the dark after they were lit.

Some volunteers lit the candles in the bags one by one. Some new wooden shelves and steps were made for the lanterns this year. They used pretty thick wood. Chris said, ‘Wow, they’re good for my bookshelves!’ He is indeed a fellow who wants something suitable for bookshelves anytime anywhere.

We didn’t want to look around at unlit lanterns when it was still daylight, so we sat and waited for it to be dark, when we heard a man’s voice. ‘Why don’t you try to light some lanterns?’ It seemed he was one of the event managers. We didn’t have any reason to refuse, so we became temporary volunteers.

Before lighting a lantern, we opened the bag and set the candle in the middle and straightened the wick, otherwise the bag itself might burn. We kept lighting lanterns slowly but carefully. The wind from the ocean was pretty strong. We noticed that a few lanterns went out, and so we lit them again. Some bags burned as well. It’s serious work to keep the lanterns lit constantly, even for an event of only a few hours.

When it seemed the lantern lighting was finished in our area, we watched some other people setting up a lantern display like a Niagara firework. We didn’t see how they connected about ten bags in a line, but they prepared about a dozen lines and hung the lit lanterns from the bridge railing. When it was almost finished, a line of lanterns caught fire and dropped down into the river. It was pulled up, and did they fix it after that? We didn’t know because we moved to another lantern place at that moment.

The area around Fukuhaku-deai Bridge had a simple lantern display. Tenjin Central Park had some kind of curved pattern covering the whole park. At City Hall, it seemed that someone went to a lot of trouble setting up the lanterns. Closely packed lanterns formed some kind of pattern around a person playing an electric piano. There were also some bamboo objects and lanterns in acrylic boxes. And someone was painting a big painting to the piano accompaniment…

Anyway, we were happy to help them even a little, this time at the lantern festival.

–YS, 9 August 2005

Click here for the previous Hakata Toumyo Lantern Arts Festival page.

9 August 2005