Nagoya, Nagoya desu: Raining Mochi!

For the second time, I revisited the Doburoku festival located on the south side of Aichi, like the first visit they were serving free sake and monsters were smacking the evil out of kids.

I was able to purchase a second little cup for sake, turns out this thing is great for serving sauce during dinner. The main-monk got in on the free sake service as they were closing up shop for this part of the festival.

Below, these two were dancing to live music inside one of the shrines.

Last time, I left Doburoku around 1pm because there were other events going on and I was unaware of the 3pm throwing of mochi (Japanese rice ball).

Below, each Japanese bucket on the platform is filled with mochi, I showed up about about 15 minutes before it started raining mochi, when I got there I was kind of surprised how few people there was.

But it did not take long for everyone else to show up, blow is about 10 minutes before the event started. Throwing mochi and doburoku has happen here for over 500 years.

The MC explaining what's about to happen, I had no clue what he was saying. People around me warned me to safely place my glasses in my jacket, but I did not understand why.

Right at 3pm, they stated to throw mochi and everyone got crazy. People become really aggressive in their efforts to get mochi, people were unable to getup once they fell on the ground.

The aggressive behavior of getting mochi was not really a big deal to me, I was larger than most people around me, I was able to maintain myself. I did have one issue though, the mochi is really hard, kind of like little rocks. When they first started to throw the mochi, I was not quite ready and one brick hit me in the left-eye. I was lucky, I did not get a black-eye.