世論 What Japan Thinks

Just in case you’d thought I’d forgotton about it, here are the posts for the inaugural Japan Blog Matsuri, on the theme of matsuri, or festivals.

First up is James at Japan Probe, who, sort-of getting into my recent theme of organ transplants, submitted Videos of the Hounen Matsuri: An amazing fertility festival, which as you might suspect from the title, features none-too-work-safe videos of a massive willie. If you’re impressed, you still have time to get to this year’s event on the 15th of March in Komaki, Aichi (north of Nagoya).

Next is John from Fried Chicken Arcade, who covers the Dontosai Matsuri at Osaki Hachiman Shrine in Sendai, where people burn their New Year decorations for good fortune in the coming year.
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In order to get a bit more of a community and interaction going on here with my fellow Japan bloggers, I have decided to hold a Japan Blog Matsuri (outline and guidelines described there), basically a chance for everyone to recommend their best, or favourite, or most under-appreciated blog post for the month, based around a different theme every month.

The theme for this month, closing date midnight Japan time on the 31st, is rather appropriately “matsuri”. Take it any way you want, not just as the obvious report from a festival, but apparently it can also mean tangle or jasmine the plant, not the tea. Posting on 政, “matsurigoto”, politics, is however perhaps stretching it a bit. Visit this page to submit your posts, or just email me directly.

To get the ball rolling, if you are keen to contribute to this month’s Matsuri or even host in future, please post a comment! It would also be nice to get a logo designed, if anyone has any artistic ability.

Why contribute or host?

From a purely altuistic point of view, think of all the good you’re doing the community! From a pragmatic point of view, submitters will be getting an extra link (perhaps keyword-rich?) and the associated traffic, and perhaps might pick up an extra regular reader or two in the process. For the host, they’ll hopefully be links back from the blogs you collate, with associated traffic, plus of course going down on the record of hosts on the Japan Blog Matsuri home page.

Finally, if you fancy doing some domain name speculation, if someone purchases a jbmatsuri-based site URL and designs some sort of landing page, I would be open to discussing setting the primary URL for the Japan Blog Matsuri to that web site – this would be a free transaction, naturally, but I’d have to feel happy about who I was entrusting the Matsuri to. Having it as an unofficial home page would be no problem to me, and of course easily doable without my consent.
jbmatsuri