Matsuri da! (48): Getting eels drunk

WHAT DO YOU DO when you want to bring forth rainfall to ensure a bumper crop? Well, if you’re from Ujitawara-cho in the Kyoto Metropolitan District, you get some eels drunk and throw them into a waterfall.

Scoff if you must, but the Otaki Daimyojin Shinto shrine in that town has been performing that ceremony annually since the Edo period—which ended in 1868—so they must think it’s effective.

It’s all part of the Otaki Festival held by the shrine every September 1 as a way to make rain for the fall harvest. About 30 parishioners of the shrine are involved.

They start with three 30-centimeter-long eels, called unagi. They place the eels in a large tub and pour in a generous amount of sacred sake. As the eels are beginning to wonder just what in the heck happened to the water, a Shinto priest offers a prayer for rain. When the prayer is concluded, the parishioners, wearing white gloves, grab the eels one by one and hurl them into the basin of a nearby waterfall, which has a 60-meter drop.

Media reports say the eels are thrashing about madly after they’ve been plucked by hand from the brine. Grabbing an eel in a pool with your hand is no easy task, by the way—that’s done as a contest for children at summer festivals, and few can successfully snatch one. I wonder: are the eels thrashing because the liquor has short-circuited their primitive nervous systems, or because they’re upset at being cut off from the booze?

Of course they’ve got an excuse reason for behaving this way. There is a statue of a Fudoson in the waterfall. Those are wrathful Buddhist deities with terrifying faces to scare unbelievers into converting. This particular Fudoson is worshipped as the guardian deity of the rivers and mountains. The eels are thought to be the Fudoson’s servants (in this neighborhood, anyway). The folks in Ujitawara-cho believe that if the eels are given sake and shaken (not stirred), they become dragons, ascend to the heavens, and call forth the clouds that bring rain.

This year, the local paper interviewed a 70-year-old man who saw the ceremony for the first time. Was he surprised that priests were soaking live eels in sake and throwing them into a waterfall from a 60-meter height?

Nah. He thought it was amusing because it’s unusual for living creatures to be used in Japanese rain festivals.

Is it just my imagination, or do the rituals performed at some Japanese festivals bear a striking resemblance to the shenanigans cooked up by American frat boys towards the end of a party at a university?