Hakata hosts a lantern/”light up” festival for two weekends every year. Details were vague and directions were even worse, so we just rode our bikes to Hakata to see what we could find. We were a little nervous at first to see just a few glowing colored paper bags on the side of the street and thought we might have wasted our time. That was until we arrived at our first stop at a local park, it was also my favorite stop of the night actually. The lantern festival is exactly what you thought it would be, a lot of lanterns. No surprise there. But I’m a pretty simple guy, put a bunch of shimmering lights in front of me and I can say I’m pretty content. Now arrange them in giant patterns of flowers and things and I’m very happy.
The second stop was at a local elementary school but it was a little disappointing. The scale was much larger, but when we walked up to the top story of the school we saw that it was nothing more than a gigantic Hawks advertisement (Hawks is the mascot for the Fukuoka baseball team). So that was kind of lame.
We then met up with Adam, Ina, Hilda, and Elena at Hakata Temple just in time to see their lantern display. It was so strange because we walked by one gigantic lantern display, looked back, and suddenly all of the candles had been put out, at once. We marveled together for one second about how they had blown out all the candles at once and turned back around only to find the entire temple had been put out. According to Adam, at 21:15 sharp (all time in Japan is told, set and written in military time) everyone just joined in to blow out all the lanterns like a giant Hakata birthday cake. I was sorry that I blinked and missed it. Next weekend I will join in.
Later that night we met up with Baptiste and the others in Tenjin and walked from Hakata. It was a really great by the riverside and it reminded me of a sort of mix between 3rd Street Promenade with street performers and the lights of Universal City Walk.
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