Matsuri Season!

Fundoshi Diaspora!

If you haven't been reading along with it so far, you should -- Alan, one of our readers has begun a fundoshi-themed blog of his own, based on photography and fabric.  It's fantastic.  http://fundoshialan.blogspot.com/

(that's Alan in his fundoshi, to the left!)

One of the goals when I set out to blog about fundoshi was to get others involved. To build a community. To move people to try on a fundoshi, or to tie a fundoshi on their mate.  It's been really great to find out that I'm definitely not the first person to think of this!  There are many great fundoshi blogs, groups, and forums out there.

It's going to be my goal to link these, and make a page for those links where you can easily get to pages like Alan's, or ShyC's, or zzzDragon's, or Brian Li's.  If you've got a fundoshi-themed site you'd like linked, please leave the url in a comment or message me.

It'll be a great day when everyone knows what a fundoshi is, and when it's just one of those choices like boxers or briefs, or swim trunks.

There's some pictures after the jump, both of fundoshis and shimekomis!

The Mawashi!

Best known as the garb of sumo, the mawashi is a thickly padded variation on the fundoshi -- basically a 4-layer fundoshi -- that is not only to clothe and protect the wrestlers, the mawashi itself is a big part of sumo wrestling!  Some variation of the mawashi is also often worn during Japanese festivals, either in place of fundoshi or as one of dozens of different hybrids bewteen the two types of loincloth. 

From wikipedia:

In sumo, a mawashi (Japanese: 廻し) is the belt that the rikishi (or sumo wrestler) wears during training or in competition.  For top- (sekitori-) ranked professional rikishi, it is made of silk and comes in a variety of colors. It is approximately 30 feet (9.1 m) in length when unwrapped, about two feet wide and weighs between eight and eleven pounds. It is wrapped several times around the rikishi and fastened in the back by a large knot.