Matsuri da! (13) At this Japanese festival, they make you drink!

YOU CAN STROLL through the archives to see how often sake winds up being the primary element in some Japanese festivals, but the Saketori Festival to be held today (April 11) in Oyabe, Toyama Prefecture, is the first one I’ve heard about where the idea is for loincloth-clad men to force the onlookers to drink.

This being a Japanese festival, of course the sake is ladled out by Shinto priests on the grounds of a Shinto shrine. Now you know why that old time religion is still good enough for plenty of folks in Japan!

Twenty men are selected from the group who reached an unlucky age this year. The event begins after five in the afternoon. A lion dance is performed for about 15 minutes before they get down to the serious drinking. Someone starts pounding a taiko drum, which is the signal for the men to let out a yell and rush from the large torii to the shrine’s hall of worship. There, the Shinto priests give them the sake in dippers. The unlucky devils then return down the path from which they came and make the people lined up on the side drink the sake.

The reports don’t say how they go about doing this, but I suspect it doesn’t require a lot of coercion. In fact, the locals are probably more than willing to help their neighbors change their luck. Tradition has it that the more people they can make drink the sake, the better their luck will be during the year. They also have to spray some on the ground while they’re at it.

In fact, between splashing the sake on the shrine grounds and twisting the arms of the onlookers to make them down another free drink, the men have to keep running back and forth to the shrine to get replenishments. Reports suggest it is difficult to round up enough unlucky guys to participate every year—perhaps Oyabe has a small population–but they still go through 27 liters of sake in about 20 minutes. It’s a lot easier to line up the people to get free drinks.

The festival began in the early 17th century when a skeleton was dug up during the construction work for one of the shrine buildings. After the priests failed to perform the proper Shinto ceremony for the dead, misfortunes befell the city. So the residents took it upon themselves to splash sake on the ground to appease the divinities.

City authorities say that in 1869, the townsfolk decided it was wasteful to slosh the sake around like that—no surprise there—so they decided to drink it all themselves. That year the area was plagued by fires and a poor harvest.

Needless to say, they never did that again!