The Kinuta Mitsumine Jinja (shinto shrine) hosted an autumn festival for the community. Kinuta Mitsumine Jinja is a small shrine, so the event was itself pretty small. It consisted of a band playing live music on a stage beside the shrine, with vendors selling food and drink from their tents in the backyard behind the shrine. The whole affair had the footprint of a small park. The vendors sold food such as yakisoba as well as a wrap with cheese and pork sausage, similar to a tortilla or quesadilla. There were games such as roulette and katanuki. Katanuki is like the Korean dalgona from "The Squid Game," where a shape is punched into a slab of candy and kids carve out the shape with a toothpick, and depending on how well they do they get a prize. I didn't partake in any of these games, though. It was a little too crowded for comfort, so I just listened to some music, picked up some yakisoba and went home.
There are two kinds of festivals that happen in autumn. There is niiname-sai, which is an offering of new grains to the kami (shinto gods), and aki-matsuri, which is a celebration of autumn harvest. I presume the autumn festival I visited was an aki-matsuri, as there was a band playing music, nobody was offering grain and the mood of the festival was celebratory.
