Uminari Matsuri

Uminari Matsuri is a BF special event that ran through the middle of May 2020.

'Matsuri' means festival, usually a local festival, somewhere between neighborhood block party and carnival. They're often sponsored and supported by a combination of community institutions such as shrines or temples, small business owner organizations, cultural associations, neighborhood watches, and the like.

One of the most famous and beloved of Tokyo's festivals is Shitamachi's Uminari Matsuri, named after its location -- the street that runs outside Uminari Seaside Park is shut down to cars and filled with festival booths, while the park itself is transformed by lanterns and other decorations into a truly magical setting.

There's a lot to do, with sponsors organizing dozens of food booths, crafts booths, game booths, souvenir booths, and so on, all of which require volunteers and desire patronage. Not everyone there is there to work, of course, but even the temps are expected to slip away and get some time mingling with the crowds and seeing the sights. Yukata are not required but there will never be a better excuse to wear one, so the plumage on display is often spectacular.

Uminari Matsuri both celebrates the conclusion of summer and is one of its highlights. There's more than enough festival fun to generate many scenes, large and small, over its long, warm IC evening. We'll be kicking it off the weekend of May 15th and wrapping it up the following weekend, with plenty of suggestions for things groups can do on their own, as well as an overarching, GMed plot to bookend the event.

The Sister Schools are not sponsors of this event, but basically any other shop, restaurant, cultural site or other organization can be. So if you'd like to have been roped into running a booth for part of the night by a parent, friend, or other connection (even just being a sufficiently enthusiastic customer of a sponsor is enough), by all means note in the bullet list below what booth you're associated with, and who the sponsor is! We've seeded the list with a few suggestions that you're welcome to put yourself into, but you're equally encouraged to add more booths, and indeed we've deliberately left off some classics for others to seize. If you'd like to just show up and party, that's great too! And if all of this has inspired you to do any scenes between now and when the festival starts doing some IC setting up, that's all the better.