Photos

Mino Lantern Festival is a weekend affair that shuts down several streets in a rustic timeless area of the town. There are several hundred entries that use paper to construct lanterns. Mino is famous in Japan for the beautiful paper products or washi.
The dark streets are lined with one lantern more elaborate then the next. The paper is twisted and folded in ways you couldnt imagine. This globe shown is rather simple (if making several dozen paper cranes is simple), but it shows the depth of time that some makers have dedicated to their lanterns. I was told that some lanterns take upwards of a year to complete.