Arab News Japan

TOKYO: After a three-year hiatus, the Sumida River Lantern Festival (Toro Nagashi) was held in the popular Tokyo tourist district of Asakusa on Saturday.

In the presence of a delegation of notables from the Asakusa district, the Toro Nagashi Lantern Festival, which takes place during Japan’s festival of the dead (O Bon), was celebrated to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Great Tokyo Earthquake in which around 140,000 people are thought to have died.

In their preliminary speeches to inaugurate the event, the officials of the district and the metropolitan government remembered the dead of the Great Kanto Earthquake, as well as those who have died of Covid and the war dead in Ukraine.

Among those at the event, some young Russian tourists wrote wishes on paper lanterns, a couple of Indonesian girls told Arab News they wrote wishes for success in their studies, a Japanese couple wrote wishes for good health, and a Japanese woman prayed for her deceased parents.

At nightfall, all the participants who decorated the lanterns with their prayer wishes brought their lanterns to volunteers who lit the candles inside and slid the lanterns down a ramp into the Sumida River where they headed towards the sea.

The lanterns symbolically represent the spirits of the dead returning to the afterlife, according to Buddhist beliefs. Several thousand Japanese and tourists attended the night show.