Japan 2019 - Part 3: Lake Hamana & Tenryugawa

Summer in Japan is famous for it’s Matsuri, summer festivals. Locals gather, usually to pay respects to one of the ancient god’s or to celebrate and pray to a particular entity. As we were travelling in Late May which is the early stages of summer we were able to visit one such Matsuri on our travels.

The Matsuri we chose to go to is called the Enshu Hamakita Flying Dragon Festival. The festival is held on the Tenryugawa river, just north of the city of Hamamatsu and just east of Lake Hama. The event is staged over a weekend (usually the last weekend of May, though sometimes this does change) and consists of daytime activities of kite-flying followed by an evening of fireworks of different types. We were really pleased we made the effort to go to this festival as it was a wonderful insight into local Japanese customs and traditions and had a few different interesting aspects to experience.

By the time we travelled from Kyoto and checked into our hotel at Lake Hama it was late afternoon by the time we arrived to the festival site so we missed most of the kite-flying. We did arrive just in time though to catch the last of the display before the kites were brought back down to the ground by the teams and it was interesting to see the different designs on the kites and how the teams handled them.

The biggest of all the kites is the dragon itself which is held up by two large cranes. This forms the centrepiece of the festival during the day as well as by night when it is illuminated.

After the kite display has finished there is a gap of a few hours before the night time festivities start. This is a time to relax with friends and family and eat at the numerous food stalls. My husband naturally gravitated towards his favourite Japanese street food snack - Squid on a stick. Whilst I enjoyed checking out dango sticks and takoyaki balls.

Once the sun has set the festival activities resume with a parade of participants. The musicians head to the performance area space whilst the kite flying teams gather around a bonfire pyre. Amid the roar of drumming the bonfire is then lit and the flames stoked so that sparks fly up into the night sky.

There were a number of different musical performances but the Taiko drumming display was definitely the most impressive and awe-inspiring to watch and listen to.

After the bonfire had died down and some of key musical performances had occurred the next display of fireworks started. This style of fireworks is one I certainly haven’t seen before, they are called Tezutsu, and are hand-cylinder fireworks. It is rather mind-boggling to think about people actually holding a basket of fireworks on their hips as they explode and to see it is just as amazing - the fireworks are quite intense and high and the figures of the people holding them seem so tiny in comparison - it is almost as though they are being engulfed in smoke and sparkly flames. Truly impressive and interesting.

The final fireworks display is more typical of at least what I am used to seeing when fireworks are mentioned. Classic night sky fireworks along the length of the river in different colours. The centrepiece of this display is the large dragon kite from which small fireworks explode out from it’s mouth before a final shower of dripping fireworks falls down from it’s belly.

TRAVEL TIPS:

If you are interested in seeing this festival then it’s important to note that the festival site itself is located a distance away from the connecting local transport lines and even further away from where you will be staying at night so you will need to plan ahead and be vigilant of the time if you don’t want to end up stranded. As were were travelling with our 5-year old son we were carefully planning everything but if it had just been the two of us we could easily have made a mistake and found ourselves having a bigger adventure then expected. The festival is also designed for local enjoyment and not tourists so the information for the festival is all in Japanese as well. As we were staying in Lake Hama we were on the Tenryu Hamanako Railway line which runs between the lake and Nishi-Kajima station where I knew from my research there was a free shuttle bus running between the station and the festival site. What I didn’t realise was that the shuttle bus to the festival doesn’t run all day long - rather there is a batch of buses in the morning to go to the start of the festival and then there is a very long gap before another batch of buses that takes people just to see the night time festival. As we were arriving in the afternoon and still wanted to see the kites we ended up taking a taxi from the station to the festival site. which is about a 10-15 minute drive away. Whilst we were at the festival I managed to find a piece of paper and a friendly stallholder who spoke English who was able to translate for me the information about the return shuttle bus. We knew we would need to leave quite promptly after the festival concluded at 9pm in order to make the last train service that left at 9:26pm back towards Lake Hama. Thankfully because I had checked during the break between the kite flying and fireworks I also now knew that we would actually have to line up for a shuttle bus just before 9pm as the last shuttle bus to Nishi-Kajima station left at 8:55pm. If we had tried to go to catch the shuttle bus after the conclusion of the fireworks at 9pm we would have found ourselves headed to a completely different location as the remaining shuttle bus services that ran later after 9 went elsewhere.

The Mikan, mandarin, toilet at Higashi-Tsuzuki Station on the Tenryu Hamanako Line.

Lake Hama is an area famous for producing mikan, mandarin oranges. In order to get to the festival our hotel arranged a drop off and pick up at Higashi-Tsuzuki train station for us where even the train station toilet block is shaped to resemble a mikan orange. Definitely one of the coolest looking toilet blocks you’ll come across in your travels!

After our adventures the day and night before visiting the festival we opted for a quiet day beside the lake at our hotel, Harvest Hotel Hamanako. The lake area itself is quite large and the attractions are scattered all around, as our hotel was no the quieter side away from the train line itself we were reliant on the kindness of the concierge to drop us to the nearest station and pick us up when required so if I was to revisit the area I probably would opt to hire a car in order to best explore all the corners of this area. For those of you visiting who are relying on the trains and buses only you can still see a number of different things along that Tenryu Hamanako line and there are other hotel options over on that side of the lake that would be easier to access. The whole area looks very picturesque though from the glimpses we saw from the shuttle bus that picked us up at Washizu station at the bottom of the lake and then along the train line as we went to the festival. For us as it was a Sunday and we’d been travelling a lot over the last week and a bit we thought it was the perfect time to just relax, rest and take in the views of Lake Hamana. The one main disappointment we had here was that the hotel swimming pool wasn’t yet open for the summer season despite the heat of the day being perfect for a swim. Apparently it doesn’t open until July once the heat is really intense. So instead we contented ourselves with just admiring the view, hopping over the stepping stones across one of the water features and played a round of mini-golf on the adjacent course.

After our day of relaxation it was time to leave and head to our final key destination of our trip… Mt Fuji!

Rice Paddies flooded with water alongside Lake Hamana