Meiji Spring Grand Festival

Today we visited the Meiji Shrine in the centre of Tokyo, where a Shinto ceremony was taking place. The highlight of the ceremony, which mostly consisted of praying and giving offerings, was the dance performed by the Shrine maidens called "Urayasu-no-Mai". It is a sacred dance based on a poem by the Emperor Showa, who prayed for worldwide peace.
It says:

To ask deities
Of heaven and earth I pray
For a tranquil world
Without disturbances
- Like the sea in the morning

Unfortunately it was strictly forbidden to take any pictures of the ceremony. As a compensation we took plenty of pictures of the Shrine site and even managed to capture the Shinto priests on some of them.