Final photo of the parade goers in the Ikegami lantern festival.

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The parade went on for hours and blocks!

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Jan had read that the parade started at a train station further south and made its way along a parade route to the Honmonji Temple,
so we figured we’d disembark in the middle, and walk towards the parade route, a number of blocks away from our train station.

Knowing that there should be 300,000 plus people, we were surprised that there were so few people around.

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The highlight of the event is the mando procession in memory of Nichiren. A mando is a tall pagoda-like lantern adorned with cherry blossoms, and around 3,000 devotees carry these lanterns roughly two kilometers from Ikegami Station to the temple. “

Jan and I were staying in the Asakusa area of Tokyo that Sunday night, a one hour train ride away to the Ikegami area in southern Tokyo.

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