About 10 horses with riders in traditional samurai garb race along a beach in Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, on Saturday, during festivities celebrating the reconstruction of buildings at a local shrine.
The horses can also be seen at Soma Nomaoi, a traditional shrine festival held in late July that features armed samurai horsemen who compete to retrieve a sacred flag. The festival has been designated by the government as an important intangible cultural asset.
Following Saturday's race, about 100 participants, most wearing samurai costumes, and the horses paraded along Haragama-Obama beach.
The race was held as part of a ceremony at Soma Nakamura Jinja shrine in the city -- one of the three Soma Nomaoi venues where the festivities begin -- to transfer deities to its newly constructed main building. The shrine usually holds a series of Shikinen Sengu ceremonies to reconstruct buildings once every 20 years, but the latest one, which had been scheduled to start in 2011, was postponed by five years because of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.
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