This weekend I attended no fewer than three festivals over the course of two days and used the holiday on Monday (Health and Sports Day, ironically) to laze around in my pajamas, recovering from too much beer and taiyaki.

But it was worth it.

On Saturday, a group of friends and I took a bus to Seki in search of the perfect Japanese knife at the Sword and Cutlery festival. (You can read about my search and see pictures of my new knife here.) I also got to see a public demonstration of Japanese-sword-making, an impressive process involving a lot of sparks, hammers and white-clad twenty-fifth-generation swordsmiths.

Thus armed with knives, we hopped on a train headed for the nearby town of Mino, a place famous for its washi, Japanese paper. Every year at this time the historic section of Mino is illuminated after nightfall with hundreds of handmade, one-of-a-kind washi lanterns. I just wandered around for a couple hours, taking it all in. The crisp, clear night, the dark wooden buildings and the glowing lanterns... It was the most beautiful festival I have ever been to and the perfect celebration of autumn. (You can see all my lantern pictures here.)

But it wasn't over! My festival weekend continued the next morning, when I met a bunch of other foreigners at Ogaki City Hall for the annual Ogaki Festival shrine-carrying. Every year the prominent businesses and institutions in Ogaki construct mikoshi (shrines) or floats, which are carried on the shoulders of happi-clad employees in a parade up and down the main street. Every year Ogaki City Hall invites the foreigners living in Ogaki to carry their shrines in exchange for a lot of beer and goodwill. After the parade, all the participants convened in front of Ogaki Castle, where men on tall platforms threw handfuls of plastic-wrapped mochi down on the crowd. Have you ever seen two seemingly-ancient Japanese men wrestle with each other trying to grab a piece of pink mochi? Or seen a pack of old ladies jump up toward the flying mochi, arms outstretched, like teenagers at their first rock concert? It was madness, I tell you. Pure mochi madness.

And tomorrow is my school's sports festival. I'll run the three-legged race, or ni nin san kyaku ("two people three legs") as it's called in Japanese. I hope my team wins!