A few years back I visited some of the summer festivals of northern Honshu, the Aomori Nebuta and Hirosaki Neputa festivals, held during the first week of August. Each features several days of street parades with lit-up, painted paper floats.

For reasons unknown to me, Tsukuba's annual festival also includes a couple of Nebuta floats, trucked down from Aomori. Its good to see, but runs only for a weekend and lacks some of the excitement and enthusiasm of the original Aomori version. As someone in Aomori told me, ``Summer here is short, so we make the most of it!''. However, a close friend has also been working on taking the techniques of the traditional paper floats and adapting them to the local area. Whereas the Aomori nebuta highlight the myths and legends of the northern-most part of Japan's largest island, this one was decorated with motifs characteristic of the area around Tsukuba. Tangerines indicate the orchards around the foothills of he mountain and mulberry leaves and silk-worms recall the silk industry that used to be a mainstay of the region.