Kameido Tenjin's Wisteria Festival, Part 2

 

The famed wisteria festival held every year at Kameido Tenjin shrine. These photos are from way back in June.

The shrine is dedicated to Sugawara Michizane, the patron of scholars. It did not get its current name until 1936, but has been around since the Edo Period, in the mid-17th century. 

The wisteria festival, which consists of 100 wisteria trees creating 15 large roofs, runs from mid-April to the end of Golden Week (around May 6) every year. The shrine also holds a plum blossom festival every february and a chrysanthemum festival in November.

Their website gives you a daily update on the state of the flowers, a practice that many parks and shrines now follow. As of Monday, April 28, the flowers were at their peak. 

The wisteria are lit up from sundown to midnight, which I would definitely like to see. It may also be a great way to beat the crowds.

Takeo Paper Show 2014

Takeo Paper Show 2014 at TOLOT/heuristic SHIODOME from way back in June.

Nothing but Rabbits

Though Okunoshima Island is known for its rabbits, and the quality time you can spend with them, they don't actually sell any rabbit food on the island. Visitors should bring their own food, or better yet, do as I did and simply give them the tons of food that seem to be left over. This is easier to do on the weekend, when the number of visitors swells considerably, and the amount of food given to the rabbit is borderline dangerous. I saw a man lugging a Costco-sized bag of rabbit feed!

Rabbits are famously skittish, and can die of fright. Therefore, they must be approached with caution. They're a much less aggressive version of the deer in Nara.

After I saw the little grey bunny, I made a note to myself: come back in the spring when the bunnies are born.

 

The laziest rabbits congregate in the area immediately surrounding the hotel; the ones that live elsewhere on the island are generally warier of people. That said, wherever you go on the mountain, there will always be a couple of rabbits that run out to meet you and look like this:

 They are very hard to resist.

Rabbits snuggling together. 

Okunoshima Island

 Tadanoumi Station, aka the station with the ferry to Okunoshima, aka Rabbit Island.

After a ten-minute ferry, you land on Okunoshima. The island is small enough that you can go all the way around in a couple of hours on bike, but there are also several paths leading to the top of the mountain. One night, two days is probably the perfect length of time to stay there.

 

The entrance of the island's only hotel.

 

The beach was "officially" closed when we went in September, but it was such a warm day that we simply went in.

There was no shortage of rabbit paraphernalia anywhere on the island.

 View from the mountain.

The far side of the island.

The top of the mountain, where you can see the Seto Inland Sea. Some rabbits live all the way up here!