Kinma Matsuri: Another excuse to drink and strip at 10AM

Every year the tiny mountain town of Joyo holds the Kinma Matsuri, a sled-pulling race. "All-Japan Kinma Championship!" the banners tongue-in-cheekly exclaim, as this is the only race of it's kind in Japan. Taken from the traditional way to bring wood down from the mountains, teams of five compete to pull weighted sleds a bit over 40 meters around a tree and back. Women pull 200kg, and men pull 400kg. First prize for women is 200,000 yen, while the top prize for men is a whopping 500,000 yen. Many teams have custom sleds, but the local team "Inazuma" wins every year (13 years running).

There is also a performance prize. Teams can dress up in costumes and have time before they run to put on a show. Acts usually reflect the current pop culture scene - this year there were no fewer than three teams doing "Hard Gay". (Hard Gay being the pelvis-thrusting biker leather and hot-pants wearing comedy act which is extremely popular right now. "Whaaa~?" you say? You can check it out at ifilm) But of course none executed their act with as much pizzaz as our own HG Chikugo (top), having the balls to hand the judges a cock-in-a-bottle, and coming in first in their heat to boot. Great job, guys! They were rewarded with the fifth place performance prize, and 20,000 yen. That's a lot of beer, maybe enough to drink away memories of what they had to do to get it.

So what are we to do? Well I know some Tahitian, our lovely Kiwi island girls had the brilliant idea of adding on a guys part, and the Chikugo girls can shake it like nothing i've seen. The result was a routine to "Drums of the Islands" by Kapena featuring a group dance which then split into some judge pandering and lei-ing, and some good old-fashioned booty dancing.

Then tradgedy! Despite careful warm-up, cold weather plus tons of knee-popping squats in the guys dance resulted in a stretched ligament for one of our team. Tough as nails, she just got back up and continued to dance. Our four-wahine team still managed an eighth-place finish. After we pulled she was taken to the doctor, where the tentative prognosis was "nothing torn, come back in a few days." We're cautiously optimistic. [[**Update! Partial ligament tear. Leg brace. Yi.**]]

And the judgement?

Daiyushou, Perfomance Grand Prize. And holy shit, is that 70,000 yen?! Thank you, Joyo! This is for you, Loms!