I had never been to a festival before. Well, one, but it was just a few food stalls arranged around the "quad" (a rectangular patch of beaten up astroturf with a couple basketball hoops stationed around the perimeter) of the school I went to here a couple years ago, and the main attraction was watching their large cheerleading squad build a couple pyramids to the blare of vintage Brittney Spears coming from an equally vintage boom box. So it was lame, is what I'm saying. As such, I didn't have extraordinarily high hopes for this one.
Going into it I had little to no idea of what to expect. Other than a few whisperings I had overheard in the hallways about a "dangerous" festival coming up this weekend, I'd heard nothing at all. Why was it "dangerous?" What does that even mean? I've come to disregard most everything the Japanese call "dangerous," because 15 mile per hours winds and drinking too much apple juice fall under that category, so when they said the festival was "dangerous" I figured it could be, but only if if a swat team of angry Chinese assassins with Uzis happened to crash it. Even as we were driving there, I had no idea what was going to happen. I asked the Japanese lady driving what kind of festival it was, and she said it was some sort of harvest festival. Something people do all over Japan. Not necessarily the most explicit explanation ever (to be fair she did mention a couple other crucial things I would understand later but at the time didn't have the vocabulary to comprehend), but I did start to get a little nervous that the "danger" involved little slips of paper, a single black spot, and one unfortunate soul getting stoned to death by an angry mob of superstitious farmers.
Luckily my slip of paper was clean. My shoulder is a little sore this morning though.
JK I didn't kill anybody. But here is what happened:
After stopping off at my Japanese friend's house to pick up some happi coats for the occasion, we set off into the night, following the mass of humanity making it's way towards something I didn't really understand. We wound our way through the darkened streets for a while, gradually getting closer and closer to a fuzzy source of light and sound lurking in a grove of trees like a slowly awakening beast. Hypnotized by the interwoven call of flutes and horns, attracted like curious foreign moths to the foggy glimpses of silver and gold revealed in gaps between tree trunks and leaves, we eventually made it to the "fair grounds" I guess you could call them, and then everything made a little more sense to me. Yoshimi, my Japanese friend, had said someting about these things called "yatai" when she was explaining the festival to me, and that's a word I didn't know and one she said she couldn't really explain any better. Well, having seen them, neither can I, put luckily seeing, in this case, is understanding, so this is a "yatai"
Hmm I don't know if this is going to work... And I was going to rave about how amazingly liquid the world becomes when you can translate a little piece of it into pixels of color and light that sit on your cell phone until you email them to yourself and post them on the interent for anybody to see, but whoops, there goes that little ecstatic moment for technology. Fuck you technology for ruining yourself for me. (Unless it actually worked in which case I'm the uber idiot).
It worked (I'm revising and editing right now), but you can't see it very well, so here's another:
But, back to business. The first part of the festival was held on the grounds of a local shrine in what I suppose we could call a cul-de-sac of revelry. At the far end of the holy "U" shape stood the shrine building itself, sitting quietly in the darkness and leaving the spotlight to the real stars of the show, the yatai (which, for that purpose, were lit up with artfully placed halogen lamps and some sort of incadescent article placed inside of lamps attached to the sides of the thing (this festival must have been incredibly dangerous in the past because I imagine they must have put candles in those lanterns, and with the way they get tossed around in the process of pulling the yatai around town (something I will get into later) I bet back in the olden days there were yatai burning down left and right, filling the night with flames to go along with drunken dancing and chanting (which sounds really nice, actually)). Along the sides of the U, where the houses would usually be, were set up a shit load of little stalls selling everything from buttery baked potatoes to candy apples; there were chocolate bananas, yakisoba, takoyaki (fried octopus balls), okonomiyaki, dozens of other sorts of yaki I'd never heard of before, shaved ice, ice cream, probably even ice sculptures somewhere in there, basically any sort of festival food you could ever want, and it was all contained in the otherwordly golden haze that demarcates the realm of memory from the present moment, or just indicates spectacular mood lighting. I'm convinced at this point that Japanese people know how to manipulate light better than any other culture, they've got a really finely tuned photo-aesthetic eye, that's for sure.
It was in this ethereal landscape that the festival operated. For kids it must be the best shit ever. Speaking of kids, this festival was held pretty much right next door to my school, so I was basically every one of my students there, munching on some sort of yummy snack of another. Our encounters followed one of two patters every time: If I noticed them before they noticed me, I would stare at them until they did notice me, and then they would have a minor convulsion at the sight of me, look sheepish, say "hello chado" and then get out of there; if they saw me first, they would point at me, look really surprised, laugh, (this is all according to Yoshimi), poke me, say "hello chado" and get out of there. That was pretty funny to see them out of the classroom setting, I kinda liked that. But yeah, every neighborhood within the Hamamatsu area has a yatai, and the first part of the festival involves the yatai, ostensibly pulled by members of the town with ropes but actually powered by generators secreted within the shrines' ancient bellies, doing a processional from their berths near their stationary superior and out into the streets. I watched this for a while, looking at my kids, rocking out to the tunes of the flutes and the trumpets played by the lucky elementary students that got to ride inside the holy things and the parents that followed nervously behind, and it was good. But then, I found myself being led out of the magical cul-de-sac and into the decidedly prosaic night, and I was a little disappointed, because I thought it was over.
Not so, however. Not even by half. For the next part of the festival, everybody splits off and follows their particular yatai on a merry jaunt around the kinjo (neighborhood) chasing after it like pilgrims following an ark (sorry for mixing up my ideography, I don't can't help but bring everything back westward) past shops and houses empty because their owners are all out enjoying the evening. Along the way, the yatai stop from time to time and people hand out free beer and free food that the revelers then consume while they rest and prepare to revel some more. In between bouts of consumption, while the shrine is still stopped and waiting, somebody pulls out a bullhorn and starts yelling "O ISSHO" which apparently is the signal to dance around like a maniac for thirty seconds. It's like a dance party in the TKE house, except less grindy and dingy and more mosh-pitty. Everybody participates too, young and or old. Fathers dance around with toddlers on their shoulders and beers in their hands, grandmas get in there and raise their hands with the 20 year old dudes and chicks, and everybody is really just getting down. And then it stops, suddenly and without warning. But about ten seconds later it starts all over again. And then it stops. But then it starts again. Then it stops. Then it starts. Then it stops. Then is starts. Then it stops. Then you're pretty sure it's done but it starts and stops at least three more times before the shrine gets moving again. It's a workout, that's for sure.
We ended up following the yatai around for maybe two hours, "dancing," eating, drinking, dancing, and generally just thanking kami-sama for another good harvest. It was great. At one point I got sucked in by these drunk, entirely unintelligible old men who tried to tell me a story about how much they hated Ichiro because he's not good at baseball just fast (not true but whatever) but at the time I was pretty freaked out by them and so didn't understand what they were trying to say until like an hour later. At another point, in the mosh-pit, I found myself getting backed down Andy Huntington style by this random drunkass Japanese dude who spoke a lot of English. That was awkward, so I just turned around and we bumped butts until the crowd cleared and I could get out of there. It wasn't me, because after I escaped he found another victim. When the full moon comes out some people just get crazy I guess. Whoo, well, that's about all I got there, and boy was that ever an epic. Speaking of, the next installment coming soon. Thanks for coming.
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