After hanging out at the Kofu Castle for a while, I wanted to check out the parts of Kofu I was most familiar with 22 years ago–the shopping streets–before the main part of the Takeda Shingen Festival got under way. I couldn’t get far as a dance performance blocked an entire street through the Kofu shopping district.

Takeda Shingen’s motto was “Move as swift as wind, stay as silent as forest, attack as fierce as fire, and have an undefeatable defense like a mountain.” The abbreviated characters for this slogan are read merely as furinkazan (風林火山). At the festival six generals represented each of the four, for a total of 24 generals. The dancers also represented one of the four. Those in blue represented swift wind, green represented forest, red represented fire, and purple represented mountains.

The top picture in today’s entry must have been some mountain dancers. Some forest dancers are below. The best view was from the end of the street, pictured above. The dancers appeared like colorful waves from this vantage point. I should have taken a video for the full effect.

Posted on April 27th, 2010 under Japan • Tags: kofu, people. • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed