Kurama Station
Japan, 〒601-1111 Kyōto-fu, Kyōto-shi, Sakyō-ku, Kuramahonmachi, 鞍馬本町191
We took the subway from Fushimi Inari Station back to Demachiyanagi Station where we transferred from the Keihan Electric Railway Main Line to the Eizan Electric Railway. The station was very crowded, a big difference from when we were there just hours before. When the train arrived, all the passengers started to push and shove their way into the train.
The train journey took roughly 30 minutes as we traveled north towards mountainous areas.
Policemen were directing human traffic as we stepped out from the station and queue poles have been set up in anticipation of the huge crowd.
While we were 2 hours away from the start of the festival, there was already quite a crowd who have arrived before us.
The crowd lined up along the streets with both overseas tourists as well as Japanese Tourists. Policemen were seen scattered throughout the street trying to get people to continue walking instead of stopping by the side of the street. We took a short stroll around the village as we were unsure of what was happening and what were we expected to do.
Torches can be seen placed outside of the house of family and some of them even have their family heirloom displayed for the public to see.
We wanted to stop at an area where by there was already a crowd that is not too far away from the temple in hopes to catch a glimpse of the festival. We were however soon chased away by the policemen who asked us to continue walking along the trail.
We followed the instructions and continue walking down the path. Crowd control was quite bad as the crowd was quite lost as to what was happening and the policemen did little to handle the situation other then asking us to continue walking in circles around the village and telling us that the procession will happen around the area.
We soon found another spot to stop for quite a while. Not knowing what is happening, we waited together with another group of people along the side of the road till the skies turned dark and we started to hear noises that signalled the start of the festival.
We weren’t able to catch much, other than two small groups of guys carrying a torch down our path. The policemen soon noticed our presence and started to chase us to continue walking down the path. As we walked down the path, we came to a total standstill due to a congestion right outside the station. A huge group of people (us included) were stuck there and we all had no idea of what was happening ahead. The policemen shouted through a loudhailer (in Japanese) which most of us tourists couldn’t understand. All we could do was to slowly inch our way forward. Much to our horror, even with such a big crowd of people in the village, we saw a train packed with tourist coming into the station. After a a long period of time, we were able to make our way to the entrance of the station. We decided to head back towards Kyoto Station to find food as we did not have lunch. It was overall quite an unpleasant experience as there was way too many people and the crowd control did little to help in the situation. Even the Japanese visitors were extremely frustrated with the situation. We were simply a few years too late to visit the festival.