A dongba workshop in Osaka

PEOPLE WHO ARE BORED and can’t come up with a way to fill their spare hours in Japan have only themselves to blame. In every town there is at least one, and usually more, of what are known as karuchaa sentaa. There, for a modest fee, a person can choose to learn or learn about something interesting from among a cornucopia of subjects in classes offered from morning to night, all under the same roof.

If you want to study art, you can dabble in watercolors, oil colors, sketching with pencil (regular lead or colored), charcoal, woodblock prints, ceramics, pottery, origami, wood sculpture, and stained glass–and that doesn’t begin to exhaust the list at only one center in a small town.

There are classes in natural makeup, mah-jongg for women, chess, go, shogi, tarot, feng shui, cooking (just about anything), yoga, chi gung, exercises for the lymphatic system, and martial arts. Budding musicians can learn how to play any kind of instrument, Japanese or Western (including harmonica and ukulele), sing any kind of song, or dance any kind of dance. There are even special classes for karaoke singing.

Those interested in foreign languages can apply themselves to English (at several levels of difficulty), Korean, Chinese, French, and Italian. It goes without saying that there are classes in calligraphy, as well as classes in what’s called pen-ji, or writing kanji using a ballpoint pen.

And if you live in the Osaka area, earlier this month you could have taken part in a dongba workshop for free at the National Museum of Ethnology (link also on right sidebar).

What is dongba? The word is used to refer to the priests, culture, and pictographic script of the Naxi, an ethnic group of about 290,000 people that live in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. The dongba that drew the Osakans to the workshop was the writing system, which consists of the only pictographs in use in the world today.

The system is used exclusively by priests as a prompt for interpreting ritual texts during weddings, funerals, and other religious ceremonies. By some accounts, there are as many as 2,000 symbols. It cannot be used to represent the Naxi language, but since the Naxi now write in Chinese they don’t need to use it for that purpose.

Students at the museum’s workshop listened to a lecture on Naxi culture and the use of the characters, watched a practical writing demonstration, and tried to write a letter on their own with the script.

There is what the Japanese call a quiet boom in dongba at present. Its popularity is not hard to understand. As you can see from the accompanying examples, the glyphs are simple, unpretentious, and easy to comprehend, particularly for people who use ideographic characters to begin with.

It’s exactly the sort of thing the Japanese find attractive, and the characters are even used in this country on the labels of PET bottles and as motifs on merchandise.

Some dongba manuscripts have been registered in Memory of the World, a UNESCO program to protect cultural heritage that the body thinks is in danger of dying out. How like UNESCO and the UN! To begin with, there are more than 5,000 dongba texts in libraries in the United States and Europe. In addition, the first photo here shows dongba used in a Kirin advertisement, and the second photo shows a dongba decal (translation: I love you) stuck on a cell phone. Since the danger that the world will forget about dongba is negligible–at least the part of the world that already knows about it–one has to wonder if UNESCO just finds it a convenient way to justify its own existence.

For those with an academic temperament, here’s a paper (.pdf file) comparing the development of written Chinese with dongba that you might enjoy. It explains that the dongba pictographs are a relatively recent invention (18th century), and their use became widespread when the Naxi prospered from the opium trade and had more disposable income to produce the texts.

Rolling them bones in Heian Japan

YESTERDAY I wrote that there’s no telling what might turn up when people start rummaging around in a storeroom in Japan. There’s also no telling what they’ll dig up from an archaeological site.

Here’s an example: While shoveling around in the Okuzono ruins in Dazaifu, Fukuoka, recently, researchers uncovered a die made of rock dating from the late Heian period (11th to the 12th centuries) and about 50 small stones that had been processed for use in sugoroku, go, and hajiki.

Sugoroku is a board game that was brought over from China and has two variations to the rules. One is almost identical to backgammon, and the other is similar to Snakes and Ladders. Hajiki is a Japanese form of marbles, and everyone knows what go is.

The ruins are about 500 meters southwest of the Daizaifu Tenman-gu, a well-known Shinto shrine that had already been around for a couple of centuries before they started shooting the local version of craps nearby. The city’s Committee on Education (which is responsible for archaeological matters) said it was possible the location was a former worksite for people who made games and game equipment. They think the items might have been presented in dedication to the shrine or sold to important people who visited there.

Each side of the die is about 1.1 centimeters across. The opposing sides of modern dice add up to seven, but the arrangement of the numbers on this die is different: on the opposite side of the 6 is a 4, for example.

The stones are of different materials and colors and range in size from 0.8 to 2.0 centimeters.

The part of this story that interests me is not that the Japanese used dice. They, along with the rest of the world, have played dice games for millennia. The part that intrigues me is that the archaeologists think they might have been sold at a religious institution—and no one is particularly surprised.

What the heck–many Shinto shrines in Japan have long held festivals for offering home-brewed sake to the divinities. Now it turns out they also countenanced dice games too, some of which surely involved friendly wagers on the side!

The positive impact of McDonald’s on East Asia

DON BOUDREAUX at the site Cafe Hayek presents this post quoting a paper by Adrian E. Tschoegl that describes the positive impact of McDonald’s restaurants in Hong Kong, China, South Korea, and The Philippines.

They didn’t cite the negative impact–terrible food–but it’s worth seeing Tschoegel’s points. (I had to laugh at the improvement cited for South Korea.)

Matsuri da! (83): The iron chefs live!

LONG-TIME FRIENDS know that the Japanese can transform almost any behavior into an act of reverence at a Shinto festival, and here’s yet another example: Slicing and serving sushi.

The Sushikiri Festival (literally sushi-cutting) is held every 5 May at the Shimoniikawa Shinto shrine in Moriyama, Shiga, in supplication for a good harvest, health, and protection from disaster. It is now a national intangible cultural folk treasure.

Rather than professional sushi chefs, the slicing is done by two young men clad in traditional haori (half-coat) and hakama (divided skirt), as you can see in the photo. They use 20-centimeter-long metal chopsticks to hold the fish with their left hands while they carefully cut the fish with exaggerated motions using a 40-centimeter-long knife held in their right hands. (It is unusual to see metal chopsticks in Japan; most are wooden. The metal variety are more frequently seen in Korea.)

The fish on the menu every year is the funa, of which there are several varieties, none of which has a familiar English name (though many of them end in “carp”). The sushi is first cut for and served to the head priest of the shrine and the chairman of the local citizens’ association. In fact, they’re sitting in formal Japanese style directly across from the two men, though they’re not shown in the photo. (Try the second photo here to see them.) The fish is later distributed to the parishioners who’ve come to participate.

And this funa is not just the run-of-the-mill sushi; this treat has been fermented for three or four years before it’s served. The process originally came from China and has been used in Japan for about 1,000 years. The fermentation creates an odor that many people find unappetizing, but the dish has become a noted product of Shiga. (You can read more about it here and here. Those with a scientific turn of mind might find this to be of interest.)
　
The official story is that the festival, formally known as the Omi-no-Kenketo Festival (the sushi cutting is just one part of it) originated when funazushi was given to a divinity who drifted ashore to the banks of Lake Biwa on a raft 1,300 years ago.

But there are other stories too. Shimoniikawa is one of the six shrines in the country with Toyokiirihiko-no-Mikoto, the eldest son of the Sujin Tenno (emperor), as the enshrined deity. Some versions have it that the food was originally served to Toyokiirihiko, which would make the event closer to 2,000 years old.

Suijin is supposed to have been the 10th Tenno, but no one is sure that he actually existed. His reign years are given as 97 BC to 30 BC, which Japanese historians think is implausibly early. (His recorded life span of 119 years is just as implausible.) Accounts in the Nihon Shoki ascribe some of the same exploits to both the legendary first emperor Jimmu and to Suijin, which lead some to believe that the deeds of a Sujin who might have existed were attributed to Jimmu.

Incidentally, the Shimoniikawa shrine was in the news in March this year when it was confirmed that a Buddhist temple bell found in the storage area for the shrine’s mikoshi in May 2007 is the oldest example of a bell with both Japanese and Korean designs discovered in the country.

Cast in 1419, it is the sixth bell of this type to have ever turned up in Japan. Shown in the second photo, it is 40.6 centimeters tall, 23.9 centimeters wide, and weighs 11.2 kilograms. Reports say that it was used in the “Buddhist temple hall”, which suggests the shrine was once a joint Shinto-Buddhist facility of the kind that no longer exist, though that wasn’t explicitly stated. The Japanese decorations are the dragon heads at the top of the bell, while the Korean motifs are the plant and flower designs on the rest of the bell.

And that just goes to show: There’s no telling what you’re liable to stumble over when you start poking around in a storeroom in Japan!

A Seoul performance of the palilmu

HERE’S A SERENDIPITOUS FIND: While looking for something else, I ran across a snippet in the Korea Times about the palilmu performance in Seoul last Sunday. The palilmu is a dance performed on the first Sunday in May by 64 women divided equally into eight rows. (It’s a yin and yang thang!)

The dance was brought from China and first performed in Korea in 1116 during the Goryeo dynasty. During the Joseon dynasty, it was incorporated into the Jongmyo Daejae, or Royal Shrine Ritual, a rite to honor the ancestors of the royal family. (The Jongmyo is the royal shrine.)

It used to be a common sight once upon a time, as it was performed five times a year (the first month of each season and in December), but that ended when the Japanese arrived. The performances resumed in 1965.

The word palilmu is derived from pal, or the number eight, and ilmu, which is a line dance. The entire ritual includes other ceremonies, music, and dance, and is conducted according to Confucian practice. That’s not surprising, because Confucianism has been a strong influence in Korea, much more so than in Japan.

After watching the video here, which supposedly has explanations in four languages, I was struck by the similarity of the music with that of gagaku, or the ancient ceremonial music of the Japanese court. (Not the instrumentation, but the underlying music itself.) Like palilmu, gagaku music and dance originated in China (with some performances also coming from Korea), and neither are performed in China today.

There are two varieties of palilmu: munmu and mumu. The women perform munmu in the first part of the video, with three-holed bamboo flutes in their left hand and a wooden bar adorned with pheasant feathers in their right. The latter part of the video shows the mumu, which is a military dance. The dancers in the first four rows wield wooden swords, and those in the last four rows hold spears.

The ceremony has been designated a Korean intangible cultural asset, and (not that it makes any difference) part of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage of the world. (Here’s the explanation on the UNESCO site.)

I would have loved to have been there to see it, but the video’s the next best thing!

Postscript: Here’s a YouTube clip of a gagaku dance for comparison. Keep in mind the form also includes other dances and music unaccompanied by dance.

Drawing conclusions from Japanese demographics

THE REALITIES OF DEMOGRAPHICS and the aging of Japanese society are causing some people, primarily in private-sector businesses, to draw their own conclusions and act accordingly. Meanwhile, others are oblivious to the new realities because they can’t see–or don’t want to see–beyond their own front yard. The latter group might wind up regretting their failure to pay attention.

Here are some examples:

Item 1

The Nishinippon Shimbun published a survey earlier this week that revealed 58 hospitals and clinics in all seven Kyushu prefectures eliminated their pediatric wards during the period from April 2007 to April 2008. The primary reasons cited for the step included the declining number of children and a shortage of pediatricians. In contrast, 35 facilities added an internal medicine ward.

Some hospital officials pointed out the difficulties of pediatric practice. Because both parents are working in many more families than before, they take their children for medical examinations during their off hours, when most examinations are being conducted on emergency patients. It is also difficult to determine the severity of a child’s illness, and illnesses in children tend to become more severe more quickly than in adults. That means pediatricians must work longer hours without a commensurate increase in pay.

The 2004 reform of the system for medical education resulted in greater freedom for students to select their course of study. Since then, the number of medical students choosing pediatrics has sharply declined.

One hospital director also cited business factors as a reason. The remuneration for treating children is low, their diagnosis and treatment involve a lot of time and trouble, and fewer tests and drugs are ordered. Pediatrics always has been a money-loser for hospitals, but the falling population of children has spurred the elimination of the wards that treat them.

Here’s what is being left unsaid, but is perfectly obvious: Bright young medical students have drawn the conclusion that pediatrics is not a growth sector in Japan, and some hospitals think the sector is more trouble than it’s worth.

Why are pediatrics wards becoming unnecessary in some hospitals?

Item 2

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications released a report for 5 May–Children’s Day–estimating the national population of children on 1 April this year. The estimate counted a record low of 17,250,000 children aged 14 or younger, down 30,000 from the previous year. The number of children in this category have declined every year since 1982, or 27 straight years. According to the ministry, this age group accounts for 13.5% of the population, one of the lowest levels in the world. This percentage has been dropping for 34 consecutive years.

On the same day, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (link also on right sidebar) reported there will be fewer than 15 million children by 2015, and they will account for less than 12% of the population. The institute said that urgent measures were needed to deal with this situation.

The institute broke down the percentages by prefecture. Tokyo had the lowest percentage with 11.7%, followed by Akita with 11.8%. This is significant because these two locations represent different population extremes. It isn’t surprising that there would be fewer children in Tokyo, a megalopolis with a high percentage of singles. But Akita is a more rural prefecture with a much smaller urban population.

The prefecture with the highest percentage of children was sunny Okinawa at 18.1%. The only one in which the percentage of children rose over the past year was Tokyo–by 0.1%.

The private sector has drawn its own conclusions from this information and is taking steps to seize their financial opportunities.

Item 3

On the same day that its report on local pediatrics wards appeared, the Nishinippon Shimbun ran a feature explaining that Kyushu Electric Power, Saibu Gas, Nishitetsu Railroad, and other big businesses in the Kyushu region are ramping up their business investments in homes for the aged by building facilities on their unused land holdings. These companies are parlaying their name recognition to create facilities that provide services similar to those of hotels. Some are assisted care facilities that require initial payments ranging from several hundred thousand yen to several million yen, and a few upscale institutions require initial entry payments of more than 100 million yen (about US$ 952,000).

A facility built in Fukuoka City by Saibu Gas has 122 units on 24 floors with Italian furniture in every unit and a natural hot spring on the premises. The minimum entry fee is 30 million yen. It opened in 2006 and is now 40% occupied. Two of those units carried the 100-million-yen price tag.

The extreme aging of society

Recall that the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecast that children aged 14 and younger would account for less than 12% of the population in seven years. Statistics from the institute’s website also show that the percentage of Japan’s population aged 75 and older rose from 1.4% in 1930 to 4.7% in 1995 and to 8.8% in 2004.

Everyone knows the reasons for this: the Japanese are a healthier people to begin with, and they are living longer as a result of the advances in medical science.

That means the day there are more people aged 75 in Japan than those younger than 15 is just over the horizon. How far away is it? We might be able to count the years on our fingers, with a few toes thrown in.

To its credit, the Japanese government drew its own conclusions about this situation a long time ago. Japan’s semi-socialized medical system provides exceptional care with few of the drawbacks of the systems in Canada or Great Britain, for example. Until recently, the elderly were required to pay just 10% of their costs, and those who were registered as dependents of employed children (not unusual in this East Asian country) were exempt from payments altogether.

Considering the general abundance of modern life and the success of the Japanese pension system, the elderly—who are naturally the primary consumers of health care—had quite a deal for themselves.

But the country is in a difficult fiscal situation: gross public debt is more than 170% of GDP and is expected to continue to rise. More old people are using more health care resources paid for by public funds. And the tax-paying population is going to decline in the future, not grow.

The government began planning changes in the system a few years ago, and they inaugurated the new system on 1 April this year. Those people aged 75 and older will be required to be responsible for their own health care costs (though this has been purposely delayed to limit the political backlash), and there was a marginal increase in the monthly payments.

It’s difficult to blame anyone for the inevitable uproar that resulted.

Gray anger

The government is trying to keep outlays from getting out of hand. It’s not unreasonable to expect people to assume more responsibility for their health care, particularly when the system is so generous and affordable to begin with.

People who have ceded their responsibility for the basic functions of life to the government are not going to act their age when that government tells them fairness requires they start assuming more personal responsibility.

As the novelist Upton Sinclair once observed, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Replace salary here with benefits, and the statement describes the reaction of many Japanese elderly to the new system.

One old man on the street interviewed for national television blustered for the camera that it was as if the government was telling him it hoped he died early. In fact, some people have started calling this the “hurry up and die” insurance system.

The reaction was so intense it was cited as one of the reasons for the defeat of the ruling party’s candidate in a by-election for a lower house seat in Yamaguchi.

Yes, that is blubbering selfish stupidity, but no one seems anxious to set them straight. Indeed, no one explained the new system to them to begin with. Discussions about the reforms became public around the time the war in Iraq started, and the mass media, being an entertainment enterprise, knows it’s more entertaining when people die, preferably in explosions. Instead of covering a development that involved all Japanese, they devoted their time and resources to covering a story that involved almost no Japanese.

And when it became a public issue, the media chose to fan the political flames and turn it a potential election issue between the ruling party and the opposition rather than discuss it in a reasonable way.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government is not known for the ability to communicate with its citizens.

Failing to connect the dots

The only ones who seem to be unable to draw any conclusions are those people over the age of 75, though they are probably hiding their eyes deliberately. The government is fiscally strapped. Personal liability for health care costs is low. The population is rapidly aging, and more elderly are using health care services more often. The number of children is rapidly declining, which means the pool of potential taxpayers to pay the bills is shrinking.

And yen trees don’t grow in the gardens of Nagata-cho.

Responding to the criticism, Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo said the government would study ways to alleviate the burden on the lower-income elderly using funds from the national budget, but the new system would remain in place.

The contours of future developments are not difficult to make out, however. As health care costs continue to rise in tandem with the number of late-stage elderly, the older citizens will exercise their right to vote until they find a party that will shelter them from financial reality.

There will be no shortage of politicians volunteering for the task.

But that will inevitably place a larger financial burden on an increasingly smaller group of younger people who are employed. As with other social welfare programs, the Japanese health care system shares the same characteristics as a pyramid scheme—it requires a growing population to sustain, and that’s no longer possible in Japan. The taxpaying population won’t put up with it forever, and one day they will demand tax relief, perhaps with an American-style taxpayer revolt.

In that scenario, the logical first step would be to ration health care. Arguments in favor of that step already are being made elsewhere. As this article points out:

(In the book Setting Limits, author Daniel) Callahan proposed that the government refuse to pay for life-extending medical care for individuals beyond the age of 70 or 80, and only pay for routine care aimed at relieving their pain.

As we’ve seen, some people have been calling the new Japanese health care plan for the late-stage elderly the “hurry up and die” system. Of course that’s just silly, but it’s time those people started drawing conclusions of their own.

Otherwise, before too long, they might find that the rest of society really has begun to wish they would hurry up and die.

Matsuri da! (82): The shrine gates are burning!

TORII ARE STYLIZED GATES standing on the path that leads to the main hall of a Shinto shrine. They both mark the sacred space and serve as symbols of the shrine itself. Where there’s a torii, there’s always a shrine nearby.

The reverse of that axiom is not always true, however. There are a few shrines that don’t have torii, and two are in Matsumoto, Nagano. The parishioners don’t mind, however—there’s a good reason for their absence, and they make up for it in a big way once every year.

About 60 of these parishioners conducted the traditional Toriibi, or torii fire, in Matsumoto for three nights starting on 16 April. They placed pine torches on the side of a mountain in the eastern edge of the Shimauchi district to create the outlines of the shrine gate.

The event is held by those two shrines without torii in supplication for a bountiful harvest and household safety. Both shrines have major festivals starting on the 19th, so the Toriibi also includes the symbolism of welcoming the divinity.

The group members have their work cut out for them. The mountain rises at a 40º angle, so navigating the slope to create the roughly 60-meter-square pattern can be tricky. At 8:00 in the evening, the group of men spread out on the mountainside. After a seashell is blown to signal the start of the event, the men lift their torches and let out a loud “Oooh” to summon the divinities. They also set fires in the pattern of the kanji for 大 (large) and 一 (the number one).

The origin of this custom dates back more than 500 years, to the Warring States period that began in 1467 and lasted for about a century. Sometime in that period, members of the Ogasawara family built and defended a castle immediately to the south. This era is called the Warring States period because of the internal conflict that occurred throughout the country between local feudal lords and the military governors appointed by the Muromachi shoguns.

During one of the battles, an insurgent army attacked the castle from the northeast. As part of their attack, they set fires to besiege the castle walls and used a wind out of the north to accelerate it. The castle caught on fire and threatened the defenders. This fire eventually spread to the nearby torii, consuming one part of it in flame. When the torii fell, the wind suddenly shifted to the opposite direction, whipping up the fire and sending it toward the invading army. The castle defenders employed this stroke of luck to their advantage and routed the invaders. They believed that divine intervention caused the wind to shift and chose not to rebuild the torii. Since then, the residents’ creation of a torii out of burning pine torches is considered an act of reverence toward the divinities.

Well, that’s one explanation. Another is that people will seize on any excuse to make huge bonfires at night and have a party!

Sports and politics don’t mix

GEORGE JONAS EXPLAINS why it’s best not to mix sports and politics, using China as an example.

Ram jam city

EVERY ONE of the following statements that appeared in recent news articles is incorrect.

Reuters, 2 May

In a poll carried out after the government rammed a bill through parliament reinstating the gasoline tax from May 1…

Bloomberg, 2 May

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s ruling coalition pushed through revenue bills that will reinstate a gasoline tax…

AFP 2 May

Fukuda, concerned about a budget shortfall, rammed through parliament bills to reimpose a petrol tax that had expired, under pressure from the opposition.

Radio Australia 2 May

The bill which was rammed through parliament reinstates the 24 US cent tax. (sic)

The only way anyone can state that the bills were “rammed through” the Diet is if one is under the impression that minority parties in a parliamentary chamber should be encouraged to sign off on any legislation they oppose before it can be passed.

It’s as if these news outlets think the democratic deal is for all legislators to hold up their identification badges and vote in a display of unity for whatever idea the Great Man happens to be peddling at the time. That’s standard operating procedure in North Korea, and was in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Soviet Politburo. But some in the news media seem not to have noticed that’s not how it works in a modern democracy.

American Presidents can veto legislation they don’t care for, but if the Congress insists, it can override that veto with a two-thirds vote, and the bill becomes law. When a veto is overridden there, however, no one talks about how Congress “rammed the bill through”. The New York Times, an unrelenting opponent of the President, dealt with an override of a Bush veto this way.

Here’s the deal: If Japan’s upper house rejects a bill passed by the lower house, or ignores it for 60 days (which is what happened in this instance), the lower house can pass the bill a second time with a two-thirds majority of the members present, and it becomes law.

It’s all right there in the Constitution.

So what the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party did was simply follow Constitutional procedures. They reintroduced the bill into the lower house and passed it on a straight up-or-down vote.

No one in the opposition was locked out of the chamber, stripped of their credentials, had the safety of their family threatened, had their genitals taped to electrodes, or was taken outside and shot.

Of course they got all hot and bothered, but it’s a bit rich to complain about constitutionally correct behavior–particularly if the legislator who would complain is one who supports the policy of “defending the Constitution” to prevent the amendment of Article 9, the so-called Peace Clause.

Perhaps for some folks constitutional law is like a restaurant menu.

Now, this does not mean that anyone has to like the legislation or the fact that the tax was restored in this manner (and most Japanese voters don’t). And you can be sure the opposition will try to win votes in the next election by reminding the voters of LDP behavior (and they are sure to win some.)

But it was a simple legislative procedure. No one was strong-armed and no one is torching Toyotas in the streets.

What is does mean, however, is that the print and broadcast media would rather titillate their consumers rather than stick to reporting the facts and nothing but the facts in a news report, and leaving their Hemingway imitations for the op-ed page.

Here it is again: If your knowledge of Japan is derived from what you see, read, or hear in the Western media, then everything you know is wrong.

The parting of the seas in Korea

AN ARTICLE THAT APPEARED in the Nishinippon Shimbun about the Yeongdeungje Festival coming up this Monday and Tuesday on the island of Jindo at the southwestern tip of South Korea describes an event so intriguing it’s worth including here.

Also known as the “Mysterious Sea Path Festival”, the event is held to capitalize on the phenomenon of a literal parting of the seas. Visitors get to play the part of Moses by walking on the seabed from the village of Hoedong on the southeastern edge of the island to the nearby islet of Modo when the six-meter-deep sea parts at low tide for two hours to reveal a path about 2.8 kilometers long and 40 meters wide.

This phenomenon first attracted widespread attention in 1975 when Pierre Randi, then the French ambassador to South Korea, visited Jindo and couldn’t believe his eyes. He was so excited that he wrote an article about it for a French newspaper, calling it the South Korean Moses Miracle. Apparently, as so often happens, the locals didn’t realize what they had going for themselves until a visitor pointed it out. The phenomenon also became well known in Japan after enka singer Tendo Yoshimi struck pop gold with a song about it called Jindo Monogatari (The Jindo Tale). Tours from Japan to Jindo are well advertised and easily arranged.

About 500,000 people converge on the island from throughout South Korea and overseas to walk the walk. When the seabed begins to emerge, local people start the procession to Modo, banging gongs and bearing banners in accordance with tradition. Groups of tourists follow, some collecting edible seaweed or octopus as they go.

There’s a lot more to do than take a quick stroll along a muddy path, however. A temporary stage is set up during the festival for performances of ganggangsullae (a traditional circle dance performed by women on the night of the eighth full moon), ssitkim-gut (a shaman ritual for consoling the souls of the dead), tashiraeki (a drum performance to console relatives of the deceased), and deulnorae (songs sung while working in the fields). Some of these performances have been designated as important intangible cultural treasures of South Korea. Visitors also can sample the delights of Korean food and confections sold at 100 shops set up along the seashore.

Perhaps there’s more to the Moses connection than meets the eye, as Jindo is also considered to be the center of shamanism in South Korea. What more can you ask for? Shamans casting out the devil, the beach and sea during warm weather, Korean food, gongs and drums, and folk dances performed by women on the night of the full moon—how could anyone pass this up?

For those whose senses have been numbed by modern life, there will also be a laser show, fireworks, and a rock concert allowing the party to last deep into the night, long after the walkway to the island has sunk beneath the surface of the sea once again.

Incidentally, Jindo is the third-largest island in South Korea, and is part of a group of 250 smaller islets. The parting of the sea is a semi-regular occurrence that happens from one to three times during the year.

That means if you miss the fun this week you won’t have too long to wait until it happens again!

UPDATE: Frequent poster Martin F sends in this link from the English-language Korea Times. The snippet has a photo of this year’s event and contains the report that the organizer wanted to set a Guinness world record for the largest number of people crossing an area at the same time.

I agree with Martin’s comment that this effort spoils the event. Pretty much anything involving the Guiness world records nowadays–an interesting idea for a book when it was first published–misses the point.