Tohoku Rokkon Festival being held
A special festival “Tohoku Rokkon Festival”(/東北六魂祭, the festival of the six souls of the Northeast Region of Japan) is currently being held Jul.16-17th in Sendai City in Miyagi Pref. http://www.rokkon.jp/index-en.html
There are six prefectures in Tohoku, namely, Aomori,Akita,Iwate,Miyagi,Yamagata,and Fukushima. Each prefecture of those have traditional and famous one festivals respectively called The Six Major Festivals of Tohoku, all of which are usually held separately in their own prefecture in summer. However, some city mayors in those prefectures jointly resolved to host those six festivals together in one venue to make them a special “one big festival of Tohoku” this year in order to commemorate the souls of the casualties of the earthquake and tsunami disasters in East Japan in March and declare the determination and mental preparedness of the people for reconstruction of the damaged areas in Tohoku.
The six major festivals of Tohoku are;
Aomori Nebuta Festival(Aomori Pref.) http://www.nebuta.or.jp/english/index_e.htm ,
Akita Kanto Festival (Akita Pref.) http://www.kantou.gr.jp/english/index.htm,
Morioka Sansa Odori Festival(Iwate Pref.) http://www.sansaodori.jp/pdf/2011_pamphlet_english.pdf ,
Yamagata Hanagasa Festival(Yamagata Pref.) http://www.hanagasa.jp/ ,
Sendai Tanabata Festival (Miyagi Pref.) http://www.hanagasa.jp/ ,
and, Fukushima Waraji Matsuri festival (Fukushima Pref.) http://www.fmcnet.co.jp/waraji/index.html .
In the beginning, the steering committee of the Rokkon Festival expected some 100,000 people would visit the festival. What is surprising is, however, actuyally more than 360,000 visitors in total joined the festival in the two days, which forced the facilitators to operate the parade of the decorated floats of all the six festivals on a smaller scale than oroginally planned in order to avoid possible accidents and confusions .
At the venue of the festival, there are a lot of stalls to sell agricultural or fishery produces from the damaged areas of the disasters as a part of supproting efforts of rebuilding economy in those areas or Tohoku as a whole. 
There are a lot of visitors to the festival who buy such produces of the regional specialties.
The unexpectedly huge numbers of visitors to the event clearly and positively shows the people’s energy and passion of reconstructing the damaged areas and Tohoku region or whole of Japan.
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