There is a big Japanese festival in the botanical garden over the Labor Day long weekend. We took granddaughter Ellie, who enjoyed the openi...

Back at the Japanese Festival. The show these sumo wrestlers put on is always a big hit. Perhaps it is in part due to their inhuman scale bu...

I went back to the Japanese Festival at the botanical garden yesterday. The weather was better but it was impossibly crowded; I lasted two h...

There is a big Japanese festival at our big botanical garden over Labor Day weekend. It rained until mid-afternoon, when I went over for a w...

This Japanese man performed in a quiet corner of the garden. He had a modest pushcart that proved to be full of tricks and delights.Thi...

Kids have a try at sumo.                                

The sumo wrestlers are one of the most popular performers at the Japanese festival. It's always a group from Hawaii, where the spor...

There were several martial arts demonstrations at the Japanese Festival. I walked into this one, something I had never seen and whose n...

A dance troop from Okinawa. The island is a long way south of the rest of Japan - Taiwan is certainly no farther -  but firmly under t...

That's Japanese for children, I'm pretty sure. I used to be more-or-less able to make my needs known in Japanese but the skill ...

St. Louis Osuwa Taiko is the fixture at the Japanese Festival (along with the sake, of course). It's a high-energy mix of percuss...

Next topic: the Japanese Festival at Missouri Botanical Garden, um, just two weeks ago. At the opening ceremony the Consul General of J...

These shots are from the outdoor taiko performance later in the day. It was not until I started to edit that I noticed the performer in...

. Our town's Japanese Festival takes place every Labor Day weekend at the Missouri Botanical Garden. They regularly bring over a group o...

More pix from the Japanese Festival; there were so many, it was very difficult to choose. The first is a Caucasian girl in kimono, posing ...

Sorry that I didn't have time to post an explaination when I first put this up; I'd spent most of the day at the Missouri Botanical ...