Tokushima Illuminations

 

I spent a couple of nights in Tokushima City around Christmas time in 2016 while I was walking the Shikoku Fudo Myoo Pilgrimage, and so was able to catch the year-end illuminations.

Known as the city of water, Tokushima has a lot of rivers flowing though it (138 they claim), and rivers always double the amount of illuminations with their reflections.

Even so, Tokushima that year started a Digital LED Festival, and invited many artists working with LED lights to display their work.

The biggest artist invited was Teamlab, the arts collective known for leading-edge illuminated art environments.

Their biggest piece was titled Luminous River, and involved hundreds of large spheres floating on the surface that changed colours along with a soundtrack.

I did post on the Luminous River installation earlier....

Along one of the riverbanks was a line of digital LED artworks.

Most were inside transparent boxes, obvioulsy to protect them from the weather and the passrs-by..

Theer was also the standard illuminations, on trees, bridges etc

As well as a group of paddleboarding Santa's...

All in all a pleasantly different set of year-end illuminations....

Not sure how long the tradition carried on for, though I did read they were still doing the art display in 2018.

The previous post in this series on my walk along the Shikoku Fudo Myoo Pilgrimage was on the free Awa Puppet Museum in downtown Tokushima.

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Heiwa Dori Illuminations

Heiwa Dori is the wide boulevard in Hiroshima City that runs up to the Horoshima Peace park. There are pedestrian park spaces running along either side of the road and during December they are filled with illuminations.

Illuminations are not normally my kind of thing, but we were in the city for the night and not far from Heiwa Dori, so we braved the coldest temperatures of the winter so far to see what was up.

It was surprisingly enjoyable with not so many people out and about and a complete lack of commercialization. The illumination ran for about 800 meters on both sides of the road .

I quite liked the phoenix, but my favorite was a simple one.... a huge tree with spreading boughs......

Luminous River

I spent some time in Tokushima last December at the start of my walk along the Shikoku Fudo Myo Pilgrimage and so had the chance to see some of the illuminations.

Rather than the usual style of illuminations, Tokushima has been holding an LED Digital Art show at many sites around the city center. The biggest displays were executed by teamLab, an international arts cooperative. Luminous River, the biggest, was just a stones throw from my hotels so I got to see in many times.

More than 100 giant plastic white spheres floating on the river. Once the sun went down the spheres lit up in an everchanging sequence of colors acccmpanied by new age music piped from speakers along both banks.

The two bridges at either end already had permanent LED artwork installed on them, and on one of the bansk there was also many sculptural artworkd using lED's. Combined with all the normal illumination from the buildings it made for quite a sight....

Kokura Illuminations

At the end of my sixth day walking the Kyushu Pilgrimage I reached Kanda and took a train back to Kokura where I had a good deal on a hotel room.

It was still early in the new year so the illuminations were still up along the river near the Riverwalk Complex.

And there's not much else left to be said.......

A Walk Around Kyushu Day 6 Kokura to Kanda

January 4th 2013, and after spending the New Year with my wife I am back in Kyushu for the next leg of my 2,200 kilometer walk, starting where I left off a few days ago in Kokura.

I headed east to Mojiko and stopped in at a major shrine there before cutting over the mountains.

I visited two of the pilgrimage temples as well as a couple of other temples.

I also visited several more shrines. From Kanda I hopped on a train back to Kokura as I had a really good deal on a hotel room there. In Kokura I went out and enjoyed the illuminations.