Apparently, the origins of this festival are not quite clear: one theory says it could have been due a dispute over territory between neighboring temples, while another says it was a means to drive away wild boars. Anyway, the festival is said to have been celebrated for the past couple of hundred years. The burning hillside looks quite dramatic:
Nowadays, the actual burning of the grass is preceded by a display of fireworks. I felt like the new year had finally arrived - being used to celebrating the beginning of a new year with lots of fireworks, there had been something missing this year because the Japanese don't use fireworks on New Year's.
I enjoy fireworks a lot, so I got a bit carried away with taking pictures (that's why it took me so long to sort through them and write this blog post...). For the pictures below, I used the same technique as for the jellyfish in Kaiyukan - due to the nature of the technique, it works very well in dark surroundings.
Next to the standard fireworks, they also had a couple of rabbits (this is the year of the rabbit, after all) and deer (being Nara's signature animal).
