축제소개

This festival of soil and fire is held every September, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
The popularity and consistent success of the Icheon Ceramic Festival has earned it a special designation
among the five hundred festivals organized in association with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
The Icheon Ceramic Festival draws citizens and tourists from all walks of life.
The festival allows visitors to personally take part in the ceramic-making process.
The festival is also a significant source of revenue for the City of Icheon, and helps to promote local culture.
Icheon City will be the proud host of the World Ceramic Exposition 2001,2003, which will further encourage
the development of tourism and the ceramic industry.

Icheon, which has much potential to grow as a world-class tourist city on the basis of its hosting of the 2001 World Ceramics Expo,
holds the Japanese Cornelian Cherry Festival in early April every year to herald the new spring.
Baeksa-myeon, the site of the event and Korea's top producer of Japanese cornelian cherries, is a self-created community of over 100-year-old Japanese cornelian cherry trees. Here, farmhouses, nestled at the foot of Mt. Wonjeok in Songmal-ri, Gyeongsa-ri, and Dorip-ri, Baeksa-myeon, lie in fields covered with yellow Japanese cornelian cherry flowers in spring, and with red fruits in autumn.

The festival, which is held at harvest time each year, aims to widely publicize the superiority of Icheon rice,
which is Ichoen's representative special product and which symbolizes the city. In 2001, the festival started featuring traditional events in the harvest scene such as jachigi or a stick-hitting game on a paddy field, daljlib-taeugi or fire-making, meongseok or straw-mat-ewaving, saekki or straw-rope-weaving, and jipsin or straw-shoe-making.
Rice is polished using a home polishing machine, is cooked in a caldron and is sold on the scene.
Other than newly-harvested rice, the festival sells other agricultural products.
This event is not primarily intended to sell diverse agricultural products, however, but to present a festive forum whers farmers and tourists can mix.