A man was pointing a camera from the upper floor of a building at Chuo-dori Street where the Kanda Festival was being held

Man holding a camera on the upper floor of a building

Chuo-dori Avenue, which stretches near Akihabara Station, was crowded. Unlike usual, the pedestrianized roadway was full of people. It was the Kanda Festival. The street was covered with people who had participated in the Kanda Festival, which was held for the first time in four years since the COVID-19 pandemic, and people like me who had come to catch a glimpse of the festival. The streets were filled with people wearing happi coats and carrying cameras.

Among those carrying cameras were many tourists from abroad. It is fun just to watch a festival of a different culture, even if you don't really understand what they are doing. When I visited Mexico, I joined a festival parade that I saw without understanding what it was about. I enjoyed the festival even though I didn't know what it was about (in the end, I didn't know what it was about until the end), and the people from the other side of the world also enjoyed seeing unfamiliar people in the mix. Like me at the time, the foreign tourists holding up their cameras in Kanda seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Suddenly, I looked up and saw someone leaning out of a building window to take a picture of a portable shrine passing by. While it is fun to walk right and left on the surface of the crowded city, it must also be fun to look down on the festival from the perspective of the gods. I imagine that my camera would have taken pictures with a completely different composition.

Comment via

日本語