I’d been planning to come to Fukuoka for the festival and assumed there’d be other things to do but when I arrived I realised how wrong I was. It had been lashing it down all day and I’d got wet getting to my hostel and then soaked trying to explore earlier in the day. Luckily in the evening the weather got better and I decided to walk to the shrine where the festival race would start.
I could see the starting arena with seating as well as lanterns outside for decoration. In the shrine itself there was one of the big floats too; there were 14 of these over the town although they were no longer used in the race due to them being too tall for the power cables. There were also lots of men around not wearing much apart from the cloth wrap similar to Sumo wrestlers.
It was a nice little shrine with a good atmosphere.