Shinto priests and shrine maidens attend a ritual during the Sanja Matsuri, one of Tokyo's biggest traditional festivals, held without spectators for the second year in a row due to the COVID-19 pandemic, at a shrine in Asakusa in Tokyo on Saturday.
Jan 14, 2021
Festivals often allow people to escape their everyday lives and experience the color and cultures of the world without having to travel. In 2020, however, such opportunities like many other forms of entertainment and relaxation were limited by the coronavirus pandemic.
One such festival was the Asakusa Samba Carnival, a late-summer Tokyo highlight that sees high-tempo Brazilian rhythms filling the streets of Asakusa, a popular tourist spot in the capital.
After scrapping 2020’s event, organizers said in December they would postpone the 2021 iteration until the pandemic has passed, announcing the decision more than half a year before the event was to be held in September.
Coronavirus rains on Tokyo’s parade as Asakusa Samba Carnival postponed indefinitely
After the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics to 2021 was announced in March the Asakusa carnival organisers decided to put their event on hold
While the decision to delay seems to have come very early, the committee needs more than six months to prepare the huge event
Asakura: Following Japanese Tattoo Master Horikazu
December 21, 2020 | in Photography Asakusa is Ronin de Goede s visual diary of the time he spent following Horikazu, the traditional Japanese tattoo master in Tokyo. In 2011, Ronin knocked on the door of the renowned tattooist Horikazu shodai. Hoping to meet the great man himself, he was dismayed to hear from Horikazu’s wife that he was terminally ill and couldn’t receive visitors. A shout stalled his dejected trudge away from the house: Horikazu’s wife had called her son, who had already despatched a black Mercedes Jeep that arrived soon afterward. Ronin was whisked off to a restaurant to join Horikazuwaka, himself a hugely accomplished tattooist who apprenticed with his father, at a party at ‘the big table at the back’. This is where Ronin saw the finest collection of some of the world’s most famous bodysuits and met high-ranking yakuza for the first time.