Culture
In Yamagata Prefecture in particular, and its neighbours in general, imonikai (imoni get-togethers) are an important autumn tradition. Tourists flock to Yamagata for the Autumn Imoni Festival (Akino Imonikai) where they join local residents on the banks of the Mamigasaki River on the first Sunday in September, to eat imoni from a gigantic iron kettle, which uses a building crane to add ingredients and stir the pot. In 2009 the festival served imoni to 30,000 guests before the pot was empty.
Many schools and work organisations in Northern Japan arrange imonikai for their students or employees. Through September and October it is common to see groups of imonikai revellers on the banks of rivers, even near major highways.
Read more about this topic: Imoni
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“When women finally get liberated, they’ll do the same that men do—dog eat dog— that’s what our culture is.... Not cooperation but assassination. Women will cooperate until they attain certain goals. Then one will begin to destroy the other.”
—Alice Neel (1900–1984)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
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