The Importance of Festival

I’m going to introduce the neighborhood Neyagawa where I live now as my second blog for anthropology class. Especially I focus on the Shinto shrine which is called Sumiyoshi shrine, and which is near the Neyagawa station. Here is the photograph, as you can see it is the common shrine.　There is a two pair of stone guardian dos and offering box, and there is no one in the precinct as usual. I pass through the precinct to go to the station and to go home almost everyday, but it is rare to see the people who come to this shrine to pray, so when the people come to this shrine?














The answer is when the festival is held. 7 festivals are held in this shrine for a year, and only then many people gather in the precinct. The picture of below was taken at the akimatsuri which is held in the fall (from the web page of Sumiyoshi shrine). There are many people there and the atmosphere seems completely different from the above two photographs.
In the video which I watched in the class one anthropologist says that festival has a role to build up the relationship with neighbors, indeed it’s one of its role, but I think festival also has the role to gather people and to introduce about Shinto. This role is very important to give Japanese chances to rethink about their religion, because most of Japanese especially young generation doesn’t care which religion they believe, as the evidence they mix up different religion. For example most of Japanese have family Buddhist alter, and in spite of this, they cerebrate Christmas, moreover they go to shrine to pray their happiness on the new years day, like this they mix up at least three religion. Therefore to think about their religious festival is important in today’s Japan.