Last weekend was the annual Sakai festival. On Sunday afternoon we got on our bikes and went to watch the parade. It was a beautiful sunny October day.

People (both children and adults) dressed up in costumes from different periods of Japan’s history. There were priests:

Elegant ladies in traditional dress:

and in western dress:

There were musketeers from the time of the Warring States:

and samurai:

There were representatives of the Vietnamese community, dressed in colourful national costume:

And Korean dancers, also in beautiful colourful costume:

Sakai is also a city of bicycles, and some strange and wonderful antique cycles (or replicas) featured in the parade:

A highlight of the parade was this ship, honouring Sakai’s historic role in the nanban boueki—trade with Europe, to which I will return in a later post:

Other aspects of Sakai that were featured include the historic wooden lighthouse, a scale model of which was driven along the street,

and the “Chin-chin train” – the Hankai tram that runs from Sakai to Tennoji.