Higurashi Ch.2 (Pt 9): Neo Learns of the Dark Tales Surrounding the Watanagashi Festival
19[BLIND LET'S PLAY]
When the day of the Watanagashi festival finally arrives, Neo and the other club members have some fun amongst all the stalls before the festival starts proper, and some of that fun involves acting as sales people to a food stall that essentially sells fried octopus... that doesn't have much octopus in it at all. When it comes to THAT particular stall, the club members use the lack of octopus in the food AS ITS MAIN SELLING POINT in order to get more people to come to said stall instead of all the nearby competition. In complete defiance to all logic and reason, Keiichi successfully manages to pull this off, and when the other food vendors see this miraculous sales pitch it doesn't take long at all before the entire club finds itself acting as sales people to numerous stalls. Unfortunately the fun is brought to a premature end when Shion appears and upsets Mion, and by this time the festival starts, so everyone heads to the shrine to prepare to witness its opening act.
But on the to the shrine Keiichi is stopped by Shion, who encourages him to follow her. Keiichi reluctantly complies, and before he and Neo knows it they finds themselves in front of a storehouse a little ways away from the shrine... and they see Tomitake and Takano meeting up in front of it and attempting to break in. When confronted, Tomitake and Takano fess up to wanting to break into the storehouse because it is supposed to contain a host of ritual implements that is only to be used by members of the Furude family, and can only be entered by members of the same family. The duo wants to see these implements and see if they can help shed some light on Hinamizawa's history, and when presented with this idea Keiichi and Shion decide to accompany them inside.
When they get inside, they see a host of tools that were clearly designed to torture, dissect and otherwise chop up human bodies, and when everyone gets a good look at the various ritual implements Takano takes the opportunity to tell Keiichi about the history of the Watanagashi festival, its roots in Hinamizawa's long history, and the role the various ritual implements had in both. In short, even though they're told from the perspective that the supernatural origins of the village are true and that demons exist, the tales surrounding the Watanagashi festival are quite dark indeed...