Summer is upon us, which means there are lots of great opportunities to travel around Japan and enjoy the many festivals of this season. However, some summer festivals aren’t all fun and games, as these clips from a Japanese media report on Himeji’s Yukata Matsuri demonstrate:

Apparently a large number of bosozoku biker gang members were in attendance at this year’s Yukata Matsuri, making lots of trouble for the police and security volunteers at the festival. Here’s another clip of clashes between bosozoku and police:

Allison Burke, a blogger who was present at this year’s matsuri, described the relationship between the police and the bosozoku:

This seems to be the bosozoku coming up, screaming in the cops faces, throwing anything and everything at them, and seeing just how far they can push the police. For their part, the police reaction seems to be to hold their ground, and try to talk the bosozoku into going home.

When I got down to the station, there were probably about 200 riot police encircling these big buses for hauling people off. They lined up side by side with their big rectacngular shields forming a mobile barrier between them and the crowd. They needed these shields and helmets to fend off the advances of the bosozoku. The bosozoku were all dressed up for the event, wearing long embroidered coats and matching pants, and orange/blondish dyed hair. I’ve been warned against taking pictures of them, so I have no visuals. But the bosozoku were throwing everything and anything they could find at the cops, who would occassionally make a rush at the crowd. It was kind of scary, but there were as many spectators as cops. There was one girl, probably with a bosozoku, who had her two young daughters running around near their strollers through all of this, so I figured it couldn’t be all that unsafe. It really looked more like a sports game than a riot- which I guess it couldn’t reall be designated as one. The bosozoku seemed to know just how far they could push the cops before backing off, and the cops seemed to hold their ranks well and not get to pissed off of excited through all of this.

I guess things seem a lot scarier from the point of view of a cameraman “embedded” with the bosozoku as they fight with the cops?