Festivals of Japan - Namahage Sedo festival 2023 4K HDR

Namahage is a traditional Japanese folklore about people dressed as demons looking for bad children around Lunar New Year. There are many origin stories about this custom, which you can read more about on Wikipedia. To commemorate this tradition, the city of Oga in Akita prefecture holds an annual Namahage Sedo festival.
After two years of the festival being cancelled and then reduced, I finally had the opportunity to attend this festival. I visited the event and watched as the history of Namahage was presented. I saw namahage danced around a huge bonfire, namahage dance accompanied by a powerful Japanese taiko drum performance and namahage procession carrying fire torches through the crowd. The last event was namahage walking around, searching for "bad children".
There was no way that there were any cats around, but there were many crying babies. 😹.