Mikoshi Festival

We went to a festival this past week. In May, many Japanese communities celebrate by carrying around small replicas of their community shrine, called a Mikoshi. It takes quite a few people, taking turns, to carry the "small" replicas on their shoulders. They are dressed in traditional tops with headties and usually no pants (us American just cannot help giggling, although we try not to, lol) The day is spent carrying around the Mikoshi around the city followed by a parade of celebrating people and large drums. It is considered good luck to be passed by Mikoshi! We had the awesome experience two years ago of seeing the seven Mikoshis being carried around in Tokyo from one of the biggest shrines.

At this festival, we ate so much yummy Japanese festival food. Here n Yokosuka, a bulk of the food is centered around squid. All of us like squid, even before coming to Japan, so we love taste testing as much as we can! We had squid balls made with a sweet batter, yakisoba noodles with cooked squid and even had whole (small) squid grilled in a stick! Yumm!!!! As treats, we had candy covered apples and candy covered bananas. Japan has really grown on us- we love it here! 

As we enter summer, our family enters into our unschooling phase. We use the world around us as a teacher, at my children's pace. We also like to focus on unit studies and have been planning a few:

• Historic Japan with a visit to Kyoto
• Buddhism with visits to many Buddhist temples and shines
• Japanese sea life with visits to aquariums and boat rides in the water around us
• Traditional Japanese cooking

Needless to say we are very excited. We will still be keeping up with T4L each day and playing games such as sentence match   but that never feels like doing doing school to the kids!