Tachineputa Festival in Goshogawara

No matter where you are in Japan, summer is the time for festivals. Last year, I only had the opportunity to go to Aomori City's Nebuta Festival. This year, I took a trip outside the city to Goshogawara to see the Tachineputa Festival.

Goshogawara is a smaller and older city compared to Aomori City. The streets are narrow and are lined with lamp posts and power lines. Because of this, they can't parade very wide floats like in the Nebuta Festival. To make their floats bigger and more impressive, the only direction is upwards! Tachineputa itself means "standing Neputa float", and some of them are towers reaching 6 stories!

Your standard Nebuta float.

And a Tachineputa float by comparison.

A relatively small one is still taller than your standard convenience store sign.

While the Tachineputa festival features the same instruments as the Nebuta Festival (flutes, cymbals, and taiko drums), they play a different rhythm and melody. They also have a different chant. In the Nebuta Festival, they say "Rasse-ra, rasse-ra!" which is supposedly derived from the war chant "dase dase!" meaning "drive ['em] out!" In the Tachineputa Festival, they yell "Yattemare yattemare!" which roughly translates into "beat the crap out of ’em!" In any case, they are all aggressive and war-related.

Getting to Goshogawara is fairly easy by train, and doesn't cost too much either (~500 yen). I am fairly certain there is a bus that runs there too. I've even considered biking there, since it's only 25 km from Aomori City. The only problem is how to get back home, as the trains and buses stop well before the end of the festival. The best option would be by car, but we made a wrong turn and got stuck in some horrific traffic thanks to a navigation blunder made by our friend. That, and you also have to park a short distance away from the actual festival route because of the crowds.

We parked at a department store called ELM about a mile away. On the way to the car after the festival, we walked alongside a river area and heard an oddly familiar cow mooing noise. We were confused at first, but a Japanese friend explained that they were frogs called ushigaeru, or bullfrogs. As we walked down the path, each successive "moo" from the river made us burst into laughter.

That's all for this time! I hope to bring you more festival footage from different places in the coming years!