Yanai Goldfish Festival

The Yanai Annual Goldfish Festival consisted of thousands of goldfish lanterns hung and lit up around the town. We took the train there from Iwakuni and it was our first train experience in Japan! It took us right along the water and was a short 40 minute trip with great views of the islands in the distance. Yanai is a much smaller city (town) than Iwakuni and has a historic area with traditional Japanese homes. Getting off the train, I was eager to find this cobblestone street that has so much character and is so vastly different than the concrete industrial area of Iwakuni. The goldfish lantern is a folk craft symbol of Yanai and is recognized around the country. Thousands of visitors flocked to this little fishing town for this event.

We arrived early and decided to explore the narrow streets, buying our very own goldfish lantern, some dough on a stick (?), and finding a historic soy sauce factory. Walking into this large wooden, barn like building, it smelled amazing inside! There were huge vats of soy sauce that were fermenting and lots of different types of soy sauce to try. The soy sauce here is nothing like what we have in America. It has so much flavor, is much less salty, and has many different variations of tastes! Of course we had to buy our own bottle of soy sauce and can't wait to try all the different kinds.

I love the artfully designed city street gutters everywhere!

The main event of the festival is some sort of fish float spinning competition. Groups make their own goldfish lantern float, and they come into a circle on the road and spin it wildly without hitting the crowd. There are referees with whistles but we have no idea how one float wins over another. Either way, it was a fun spectacle to watch! The mayor / leader (?) of the town gave a speech, blessed the festival and cheered "Kanpai!" at the end before taking a swig of something in his canteen. One of our favorite floats had bubbles coming out of the goldfish's mouth, disco lights and little kids inside that were along for the ride waving out the window.

Soon after the fish spinning event, I was awaiting sunset and all the lanterns to light up around the town! I hope to return again when there are less people to get better sunset photos of the historic district, but these pictures still turned out great. Believe it or not, there were also fireworks at the end of this festival, but in order to make the train back ahead of the thousands of people, we decided to leave a bit early. Trying to walk back to the train station against a sea of people was pretty tricky, the Japanese sure know how to celebrate and they were just getting started!

To see all the photos from this festival, please click here.