My visit to Karatsu is covered in these two posts:

• Karatsu Kunchi 2016 (this post)
• Karatsu Castle

Karatsu Kunchi is a noisy, crowded, exciting and beautiful event that takes place in Karatsu (Saga prefecture) in early November over the course of 3 days. It features large floats shaped as samurai helmets, different fantastic creatures and characters and a very red, very shiny sea bream fish (my favorite). The floats are pulled through the town streets by teams of locals, with music, drumming and cheering. There is a day time and a night time parade.

All the night festivals I’ve seen in Japan were very beautiful, and Karatsu Kunchi was no exception. I enjoyed the day time event too, and even made a video, mostly to capture the cheerful sounds.

Night time parade

This was the evening of the same day I didn’t see the balloons. I arrived to Karatsu very tired, but as soon as I saw the floats I was caught up in the festive mood and ended up having a great time there.

Daytime parade

This was the morning of the following day. I hopped on a train again from Saga, this time I planned wisely and didn’t have to stand all the way. My goal was to see the Otabisho shinko – the focal point of the whole festival, where the floats are being pulled through the sand-covered courtyard and lined up in a certain manner in front of the shinto shrines “overlooking” the whole thing (the meaning of this is to pay respect to the gods). I arrived early and made a short detour to see the Karatsu castle, then headed to the Otabisho location on the other end of the beach, picked myself a nice spot and saw everything from close distance – actually at some point I was in the middle of things (people just kind of overflowed and spilled into the courtyard).

Nice day, good memories. Watch the video below to see what it was like.

Watch the video

Location of daytime Otabisho Shinko event: