Matsuri da! (126): It’s ganko!

THE festival tradition in Japan stretches back for centuries, and some festivals are more than a thousand years old. But in Japan any old excuse is fine if it’s in the cause of a good time, so new festivals are always being created. Unlike the traditional events, they have no Shinto underpinning.

Representative of the new wave in free public entertainment is the Hamamatsu Yosakoi Ganko Matsuri, held last month in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka. This year’s festival was just the twelfth. Hamamatsu is known as the home of motorcycles and musical instruments—Yamaha and Kawai are headquartered here—and it was also the site of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s worst military defeat before he became the first Tokugawa shogun in 1603.

Ganko is a word from the local dialect that translates into standard Japanese as hijo ni (extremely) or sugoi (a word used to excess in everyday speech in the same way that “awesome” is used to excess in the United States, with much the same meaning). So, you could say that the name Ganko Matsuri means Super Festival, and that’s exactly what the organizers suggest in Japanese.

There’s only one rule, and it’s simple—anyone may participate as long as they have a musical instrument, no matter how rudimentary, and they dance. Until a few years ago, the rule was that participants had to use naruko, or wooden clappers. That was later amended to include any musical instruments, traditional or modern, including the clappers. Other than that, people are free to do what they like, including design their own costumes and create their own dance, whether it be old-fashioned bon odori or hip-hop. And they do.

Participation is by team, and last month about 4,300 people from throughout the country showed up to perform in 119 groups ranging from 15 to 100 people. Some in the group may specialize in singing or chanting, waving banners, or playing the musical instruments or clappers. In addition to parading down the city’s streets — which the gives the residents the opportunity to get in on the action — the teams get individual time on stage to be judged for awards. They have all of five minutes and 30 seconds to get on, line up, perform, and leave.

The Organizing Committee has a high-minded list of festival objectives, which include boosting the city and its industries, promoting interaction with people from other parts of the country, and encouraging citizen participation in local activities, but it’s really just a cover for “Have a good time.” Many of the performers are college students enjoying themselves in extracurricular activities. Here’s a taste of what it looked like this year. If what you’re seeing or hearing at any given moment doesn’t appeal to you, wait about 30 seconds. You’ll be seeing and hearing something different.

Matsuri da! (124): Kareki ni hana

The expression kareki ni hana (枯れ木に花) literally means a flower on a dead tree, but the Japanese use it to refer to something that had waned but is now flourishing again. Whenever they want to come up with something fresh for the traditional Shinto festivals — the best free entertainment in the world — all they have to do is look into their past to see what they’ve already done. Here are three recent examples.

Kagibiki

For years, the Kagoshimanians in Kimotsuki-cho performed the kagibiki as part of the Ohaku Shinto shrine spring festival in supplication for a good harvest, good health, and safety. There are two parts to the event — the first is a stick dance, which is shown here. That’s followed by the kagibiki itself, which is a tug-of-war with a 1.4-meter-long pole instead of a rope. In events of this sort, the teams are usually separated by geographical region, and one team’s victory is an indication that the divinities will bless them with a good crop. In this town, the east and west face off against each other.

Performances of the event stopped five years ago because there were too few children in the small agricultural community to conduct the dance properly. This year, however, some nearby small towns sent over some kids to help out, and 18 people in the local preservation society cut out sticks from the trees behind the shrine to provide all the equipment they needed.

The dancers are also the pullers during the kagibiki, but the other townspeople join in as the spirit moves them, once the blood starts rising with the beat of the taiko drums. One 90-year-old woman brought her children and grandchildren to watch. “I hadn’t seen it in a long time,” she explained. “I was so thankful I felt like crying. I want them to continue next year.”

Here’s what the big fun looked like in another town where they used what looks like a real tree.

Kagura

It’s been a lot longer since the Takayamanians in Gifu have performed the children’s kagura (i.e. Shinto dance) during the Hie Shinto shrine spring festival. In fact, it’s been 60 years. In its infinite wisdom, the GHQ during the postwar occupation forbid the performance of the sword dance, one part of the kagura, because swords are not healthy for children or other living things. The other part of this kagura is the halberd dance, and that ended when the guy who taught it died in 1955.

Now that the Americans have bigger fish to fry than to prevent costumed kids in occupied countries from playing with swords under adult supervision, the folks in Takayama thought it was high time to bring it back. The city fathers pitched in two-thirds of the cost to conduct the research and recreate the equipment, and for the rest of the cash they hit up a program sponsored by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport for the creation of “historical environments”. (Why it’s not a program in the Agency for Cultural Affairs, I’m not sure.)

The preservation committee dug into the records, interviewed the people who saw the last performances, and took notes at four other similar shrine dances in the city. The dance involves walking around an octagonal shape created by tatami, and the object is to purify the area in every direction. They made the costumes, the swords, and the halberds, and trained four fifth-grade boys to perform the dance (two for each one).

Said the chairman of preservation committee: “Now it’s up to the courage of the children.”

Isn’t it always?

Mawari Odori

Finally, they’ll be bringing back the mawari odori, or the turning dance, in Yoshinogawa, Tokushima, in August. You’d think they wouldn’t have willingly let the city’s intangible cultural treasure die out, especially because it’s at least 500 years old, but depopulation was the problem. This is the second comeback for the dance, different forms of which are considered one of the three major types of popular festival dances in Japan. It ended the first time in 2003, was restored in 2007 and 2008, and then ended again after a municipal merger and the organizations for maintaining it had not been created.

A city NPO formed an executive committee to keep it going this time, and the committee will transform itself into a preservation committee after August. Their intention is to promote its spread to other small settlements in the area. The mawari odori is actually a combination of song and dance that is an offering to ancestors, but it’s also a form of summer entertainment. The song is in the form of a male-female dialogue during the mid-August bon festival, and believe it or not, the now-sedate bon odori was once an excuse for the young men and women of isolated farming communities to have a little adult fun. An invitation to dance was a de facto invitation to head to the nearest clump of dark bushes as soon as possible to continue with the eternal dance. Bon odori was so bawdy it was actually banned on a couple of occasions during the Edo period.

A chorus leader begins the song, which is the signal to form a circle and start dancing, somewhat like an American square dance. There’s a greater sense of urgency this time; there are only two or three chorus leaders who remember all the words, and they’re getting old. Besides, young adults have plenty of other opportunities to get friendly nowadays. Said the director of the committee: “If we don’t pass it on now, we’ll never be able to revive it again. I hope that many people participate and we can spread the circle of activity.”

Here’s a different version of the dance in Kuroishi, Aomori.

Matsuri da! (123): Keep on trucking

A PROMINENT feature of many Japanese festivals is a procession with elaborate floats or mikoshi. They are often larger than a single-family dwelling, centuries old, and crafted with exquisite workmanship and materials. These relics are literally priceless.

But that’s not true of all festivals.

One example is the Uodon Matsuri held by the Hakosaki Hachiman shrine last month in Yusui-cho, Kagoshima. The festival, which is at least 500 years old, is an annual event to purge the local district once known as Yoshimatsu-cho of sin and impurities. This is accomplished by tying carved wooden masks of a male and female divinity to the end of stakes and then parading them around the district while the shrine priest chants, “Uo, uo” to announce their presence. After the divinities have passed through every neighborhood, the masks are attached to bamboo stakes six meters high. These are placed on either side of National Highway #268 at the border with Miyazaki Prefecture and connected with a shimenawa, or sacred rope. There’s no better way to ensure that all the outsiders coming into the district will be purified too.

No sticklers for needless tradition, the priests at the shrine have availed themselves of technological advances over the centuries to make their job easier. Originally, the masks of the divinities were carried on horseback. The priests later switched from horses to bicycles. But why get sweaty and out of breath with all that pedaling when you can make it even easier on yourself? Nowadays, they lash the stakes to the bed of a small pickup truck and chauffer the deities around, as you can see from the photo.

Let’s not forget another advantage to the trucks: I don’t think the highway patrol will pull that driver over, do you?

Incidentally “Uo” seems to be Kagoshimanian for the names of the divinities, and is written 大王. That’s usually pronounced daio and means great king. I couldn’t find an explanation for the name, or indeed any information beyond the content of the post. I suspect the “don” is also from the regional dialect. If I’m not mistaken, it’s derived from 共 (tomo), and is used to create plurals, such as in kodomo for children. Here’s an explanation in Japanese, but feel free to correct me if I’ve misinterpreted it.

And here’s a curiosity: Despite the funkiness with the truck, the shrine also has a short promotional video that presents a rather different image:

*****
After six days on the road, anyone would need purifying, not just the truckers.

Matsuri da! (122): The air’s apparent

THIS is going to stump everybody, including the Japanese readers: What is the object shown in the following photograph?

Here’s a hint, but it won’t help at all: Those are five-meter-square stainless steel sheets.

The answer? It’s a Shinto shrine in Asahi-machi, Yamagata.

In fact, that’s a photograph of the Kuki shrine’s main sanctuary, the site in all shrines which houses the shintai, the sacred object in which the spirit of the deity resides. The deity in Shinto is described as the yaoyorozu no kami, or the 800 myriads of divinities, which some (but not all) interpret as being different aspects of the One. Therefore, the presence of the divinity is manifest in every aspect of life.

Some deities are divinized ancestors or famous figures of the past. (That’s the point behind the often misunderstood concept of the Emperor as a “living god” until 1945, or the enshrinement of the spirits of the war dead in Yasukuni.) Natural phenomena are deities: the wind, sun, moon, water, mountains, trees, and rocks (including those that are phallic- and yonic-shaped). Man-made objects can be divinities: mirrors, swords, polished stones (tama), bells, clothes, dishes, and, after Buddhism began to exert an influence, paintings and statues. Mirrors have been used in Shinto worship since ancient times, so the creation of what is essentially a large mirror isn’t as odd as it might seem at first glance.

The deity worshipped at this shrine is air. That’s why it’s called the Air Shrine (unless you can think of a better translation for 空気神社).

On the approach to this site, one passes through monuments to earth, fire, wood, metal, and water, the five elements that created the cosmos.

As you might expect, Asahi-machi is located in a glorious natural setting — the somewhere in what city slickers would call the middle of nowhere — and the primary occupation of the residents is rice and fruit cultivation. Before he died in 1986, Shirakawa Chiyo, one of the older Asahi-machi natives, offered the opinion that the town should build a shrine in which air was the tutelary deity as a way to give thanks for the clean air that was a blessing to them all.

Nothing came of Mr. Shirakawa’s idea when he was alive, but it began to get serious consideration a year after he died in 1987, when the town launched a municipal development campaign. Because this is a religious institution, the money to build it had to come from private citizen/sector donations. Even though the Japanese are extraordinarily ecumenical, that wasn’t an easy sell. Still, they collected the money they needed and finished the shrine the following year.

Yeah, they pray there.

The idea behind the use of stainless steel for the air shrine was that it would reflect natural views of the surrounding area throughout the year from different perspectives. This would help people reflect on the existence of air.

Yeah, they have festivals there too.

The townsfolk designated 5 June as the local Air Day, which coincides with World Environment Day. They hold the Air Festival every year on the Saturday closest to Air Day. The main sanctuary is open to the public for viewing the divinity and pausing for reflections suitable for the spirit of the occasion. There’s also a performance by the miko of kagura, or Shinto Dance, which is traditional at shrine festivals. That’s shown in the photo above.

Oh yeah, there’s even a video:

And to conclude here’s a question theological but not rhetorical — Is the sound of the wind on that video the voice of the divinity?

Matsuri da! (121): Hanging the sake balls

EVERYONE who’s seen a movie whose action takes place aboard a naval vessel knows the phrase, “The smoking lamp is lit”. It originated in the era of wooden sailing ships, when preventing fires was the first order of business and permission to smoke was signaled by lighting a lamp hanging at the forecastle.

Years ago, the sake establishments in Kyoto had a similar signal that must have been more eagerly awaited by landlubbers and swabbies alike. The proprietors of those establishments hung a ball made of leaves from the Japanese cedar to announce that a new batch of sake was finished and ready to be poured down the hatch.

Nowadays all that’s required is to look for a tavern where the exterior lights are still on and the noren (shop curtain) is suspended over the door, but the custom of leaf ball hanging still lives at the Matsuo Taisha, a Shinto shrine in Kyoto. In fact, a male parishioner put up three last week — one at the main building, one at the administrative office, and one at the storehouse where the mikoshi, or portable shrine for the deity, is kept.

This is a Shinto event, after all, so of course they’ve maintained the liquor connection. The balls are hung from the eaves with care as part of the Jo’u Festival held at the shrine every autumn in supplication for the safety of the sake brewers. As every devout worshipper knows, the first commandment for getting righteously ripped is divine protection for the brewers.

The sake/Matsuo Taisha link is a very long one. A shrine was first established on the current site in 701 — note the triple digits — though they didn’t settle on the Matsuo name until 1950. It’s associated with the Hata clan, a prominent immigrant clan whose origins are in China and who are thought to have come to Japan from Korea in the 3rd Century. According to the barroom scuttlebutt, one of the jewels of continental culture the Hatas brought with them was sake brewing techniques. The shrine’s association with grog in the popular imagination is at least several centuries old: It’s mentioned in that connection in a kyogen comedy from the 16th century.

In an interesting turnabout, the ball of leaves was originally hung as part of the festival to denote the start of a new sake batch, rather than its completion. The heavenly spheres are about 60-70 centimeters in diameter, and they’re made from the trees in a grove at nearby Nantan. The festival itself has been expanded to include the manufacturers and wholesalers of other fermented food items, such as soy sauce and miso paste. This year, representatives of about 50 companies showed up to receive their blessings.

What do they give in return? Take a look at that wall of sake barrels in this brief video to see.

Matsuri da! (120): What goes down must come up

PARTICIPATING in the activities of most of the world’s standard-brand religions doesn’t require much physical exertion, other than getting yourself to the church/temple/mosque on time. (The less said about the exceptions of self-flagellation and self-immolation the better.)

Those who keep the Shinto tradition alive in Japan would rather enjoy than beat or burn the heck out of themselves, but heavy and difficult manual labor is part of the package at some shrines. One example is the autumn festival held at the Oyama Afuri shrine in Isehara, Kanagawa. A Shinto shrine is said to have been first established on that site, the summit of a 1,251-meter-high mountain (Oyama means “big mountain”), more than 2,200 years ago. Those skeptical of legends should know that shards of earthen vessels have been excavated at the mountain top that are thought to have been used in Shinto festivals and have been dated from the Jomon Period. That ended around 300 BC.

The shrine itself consists of two separate buildings: An upper shrine and a lower shrine, named for their position relative to each other. Their autumn festival is held for three days at the end of August, and it starts with a ceremony called the okudari. During that ceremony, the parishioners carry a portable shrine called a mikoshi that transports the tutelary diety from the lower shrine to the town below. As you can see from the photo here and the photos on the shrine’s Japanese-language website, that requires much more than rolling up one’s sleeves and spitting into one’s palms. The transportation of the divinity requires two separate groups of people — one to carry the mikoshi and another to keep it stable with ropes. Then there’s another group of taiko drummers to keep the spirits bright and to lighten the load. The trip downhill takes about 40 minutes.

When they reach bottom, they stash the mikoshi at the shrine office to watch over the proceedings for the next three days and to protect the town and its people. Those proceedings consist of a performance of yamato-mai, a dance often performed at Shinto rites and the ceremony during the Emperor’s accession to the throne. There are also other dances by maiko (shrine maidens), performances of noh and kyogen, and a procession of mikoshi from other local shrines.

Here’s a brief glimpse of that procession two years ago:

On the third day they rise again and carry the mikoshi back to the lower shrine, now that summer has been officially declared over. I couldn’t find a report on how long it takes go back up the mountain, but if my walk down and back up the Grand Canyon some years ago can be used as a yardstick, they’d have to multiply the descent time by at least three.

Any mundane thoughts of hazardous duty pay or restrictions on the amount of weight that can be lifted are left behind as they head for Higher Ground. Everyone’s probably thankful that they don’t have to climb to the upper shrine, but they’d surely find a way to do that too if it were part of the tradition.

There are no videos available of the mikoshi being hauled down and up the mountain, but there is a video of a six-minute cable car ride to a station at the top filmed from the interior. It’s worth the virtual trip.

Matsuri da! (119): What a cool crash!

DESPITE the priests dressed in ancient robes who conduct ceremonies and offer prayers that are centuries old, the main activities of some Shinto festivals seem as if they were conceived by bored college frat boys with a buzz on and looking for anything else to do besides study on a midweek evening.

You won’t think I’m exaggerating after you read about the Honyama Shinji held annually in late September at the Yamasaki Hachiman-gu (shrine) in Shunan, Yamaguchi.

It started roughly 300 years ago, when this area, then part of the Tokuyama domain, suffered a particularly bad harvest. They created and conducted this festival in supplication for a bumper crop the next year.

Festival floats in Japan are often called yama, which is the word for mountain. This one has three: The honyama, or main mountain; jiiyama, or grandfather mountain, and baayama, or grandmother mountain. They’re assembled using traditional methods, which means mortised joints and no nails at all. The honyama is 2.7 meters long, 2.6 meters high, and weighs nearly a ton. They are lashed together with the kazura vine and adorned with sacred pine boughs for good luck, as well as lanterns.

The three floats are paraded through two districts near the shrine in the days leading up to the festival. Then, early in the evening on festival day, they’re taken as far as the torii in front of the shrine itself. That would be a simple matter in most instances, but in this case the Yamasaki Hachiman-gu torii is at the top of a steeply sloped hill 10 meters above the ground below.

But no logistical problem is unsolvable at a Japanese festival if there’s enough manpower and grog for the task. The solution is to pull all three floats to the top of the hill on rollers one at a time — first the jii, then the baa, and then the one-ton honyama. On board the honyama are about 10 people, including a priest and musicians.

The floats are met at the torii on the top of the hill by a group that has carried down a mikoshi — a sort of palanquin bearing the shrine’s tutelary deity — from the shrine itself. A brief Shinto ceremony is conducted with the three floats and the mikoshi facing each other.

Then they turn the floats around and push them down the hill to crash at the bottom: first the jii, then the baa, and then the honyama. When they come to a stop, the locals quickly scramble to snatch the pine boughs and the shide paper streamers that denote a sacred space. Possession of one brings good luck in the year ahead. Luck in the harvest is determined by the direction in which the honyama collapses at the bottom of the hill.

After that, the folks from Shunan disassemble the crashed floats and retrieve all the salvageable material, which is used to build next year’s floats.

Nothing’s mentioned in the newspaper reports, but it’s safe to assume that after the festival, the participants — including the priest — get just as ripped as any of those collegians in the frat house living room.

How did they come up with this idea 300 years ago? That isn’t mentioned in the newspaper reports either, and the city’s website offers no explanation.

But this is what it looks like:

Matsuri da! (118): Bug off!

ARE the folks in Ichikikushikino, Kagoshima, keeping it a secret because it works so well, or because they don’t want other people to catch them in the act?

Yesterday, 35 children in this town of 30,000 staged the annual Mushioi Odori — the Dance to Drive out the Insects — in 12 locations to the accompaniment of drums and bells. Most of the dancers were primary school students, but a few junior high and high school students were mixed in as well.

In addition to serving as a bug repellent, the dance is performed in supplication for a bountiful harvest, which is certainly a congruent objective. Most impressive, however, is the costume they wear for the dance, which you can see from the photo. How many kids do you know who would be willing to prance around in public wearing that on their backs? Either they’ve got that southern let-it-all-hang-out attitude, or their parents have extraordinary powers of persuasion.

You might expect insects to be oblivious to this sort of thing, but it must be effective, because the Ichikikushikinoans keep performing it every year. There’s even a special committee that organizes the event to pass on the traditional art. And here’s the most curious aspect of all — this is the extent of the information I was able to dig up about this event on the web. There is no word on whether the dance is associated with a Shinto shrine, how long it’s been performed, or the story behind those three multicolored whatevers. Not only are there no videos on YouTube, the town’s own website doesn’t publicize it as a local event.

The Japanese are always the first to be intrigued and amused by their unusual festivals and events. For them to have overlooked this one is unusual in itself!

*****
Ain’t no bugs on these Brazilians in New Orleans, either. It must be the costumes and the dancing after all.

Betting on the bulls now legal

IN MOST Western countries where bullfighting is performed in front of spectators in the guise of an art form, the fight ends when the matador kills the bull in the ring. (They are killed outside the ring in Portugal after the fight.) Indeed, there are reports that as many as 24,000 of the specially bred bulls are killed every year in bullfights in Spain. The artistry is held to derive from the toreador’s interpretative moves while very close to the bull, which means that he is in danger of being gored or trampled. To minimize that possibility, the bull is tranquilized, weakened by laxatives, beaten in the kidneys, partially blinded by petroleum jelly, confined in darkness before the fight, and stabbed by picadors and other men immediately after it enters the ring.

Bullfighting is also performed in front of spectators in Japan, Korea, and China. There is one significant difference, however — in this part of the world, two bulls face off against each other rather than a drugged and blinded bull charging a bully wearing a funny hat, tight pants, and twirling a cape and a sword. The winner is determined when the other bull backs off and runs away, and both bulls survive the match.

This academic paper (.pdf) offers a brief but informative description of bullfighting in Japan:

Although bullfighting occurs in six Japanese prefectures – Okinawa, Kagoshima, Ehime, Shimane, Niigata and Iwate – it is most popular in the Okinawa islands, in the Amami islands of Kagoshima prefecture and in Ehime. In Okinawa, there are eleven bullrings and thirty games a year in six locations – Okinawa City, Uruma, Ginowan, Motobu, Imakijin, and Yontani. (On the island of) Tokunoshima (Amami), there are thirteen bullrings in Tokunoshima, Isen, and Amagi and twenty games a year. In Ehime, there is one bullring, in Uwajima and five games a year.

This is what happens after a bullfight in Spain:

This is what happens after a bullfight in Japan:

The winning bull’s owner, his family and supporters always spill into the bullring to show their delight by riding on the back of the bull and dancing with hands and legs while singing Waido-bushi.

In South Korea, meanwhile, a bullfighting festival is held every year in Cheongdo:

The age-old tradition of Korean bullfighting is no longer just a simple tournament. While it was once only basic bullfighting, the sport has developed into an international event hosting tournaments such as a national bullfighting tournament, a Korea-Japan bullfighting festival, a rodeo tournament with US Army force participants in Korea, a tournament by world-renowned professional bullfight champions and the national bullfight picture-taking tournament.

The Cheongdo Bullfighting Festival is held for five days in April in that city in the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula, about one hour north of Busan by train. It attracts roughly 300,000 people, some of whom come from Japan. (The festival website has a Japanese page to facilitate visits.) In fact, bullfighting is part of the thriving non-governmental exchange between Japan and South Korea. Here’s another passage from that academic paper:

There has been an exchange program between Korea and Tokunoshima since 1999 when three Tokunoshiman black bulls were sent to Chongdo and fought against Korean red bulls. The match was named the ‘Korea-Japan match-up’ and attracted an audience of several hundred thousand in Chongdo. After the event, goodwill ambassadors from Chongdo were sent to Tokunoshima. Honorable guests were also sent to the Bullfighting Summit in Japan (the fifth in 2002, the eighth in 2005 and the ninth in 2006).

The bullfighting in Cheongdo isn’t limited to the five-day festival, however. There are matches every weekend throughout the year in a domed ring with a capacity of 12,000. There’s no telling how the bulls will behave, so a 30-minute time limit has been set for each match. Ten matches a day are held in the 31-meter ring.

The spectacle is popular enough in South Korea that, starting on the 3rd of this month, spectators can now wager on the bulls, with the chance to win anywhere from KRW 100 to 100,000. (The max is only about $US 87.00 or JPY 6,644.) It is South Korea’s first public sector gambling operation.

Here’s a look at the Cheongdo bullfighting festival with red bulls:

And here are some scenes from Tokunoshima bullfights with black bulls, though the last features a battle between le rouge et le noir. There’s also a scene of the happy supporters riding the back of one of the winners. The last one on the bull’s back might be about the same age (six) at which some Mexican bullfighting schools accept trainees.

As a rule, my position is that comparisons are odious, particularly comparisons between East and West. This is one of the exceptions to the rule.

Afterwords:

The title of the academic paper is Transperipheral Networks. While it is worth reading to learn about Japanese bullfighting, it was written to present a different argument. As so often happens in the social sciences, the argument is trite and already obvious to the average junior high school student:

The Bullfighting and cattle raising networks discussed in this paper show that major centres are not essential to cross-regional networking. In this manner, the seemingly ‘backward’ activity of bullfighting shares aspects with the more general globalisation of information in which every (facilitated) individual in the world can relate to each other through the medium of the internet. The formation of a ‘transperipheral’ network among the bullfighting areas thereby suggests another entrance to the world of globalisation that actively counters the massification and homogenisation of centrally-produced culture in favour of translocal difference.

Ah, well. On the one hand, it gives the three authors something to do with their time and keeps them off the streets. On the other, all the authors are affiliated with Kagoshima University. That’s a national university, which means the professors are paid with public funds.

Matsuri da! (117): Bigfootin’

EVEN the people of Fukushima Prefecture who don’t live near the power plant and were unaffected by the accident must realize that the name of their home will forever be abused as a code word by the opponents of nuclear energy. Yet, despite the dark cloud that’s been painted as a permanent feature onto the skies of their lives, the Fukushimanians continue to go about those lives as they always have — and that means having a good time when the opportunity presents itself.

Early last month, the residents of Fukushima City held Phase Two of the Fukushima Waraji Matsuri, or the Straw Sandal Festival. Since this is a Japanese festival, you’ve probably already guessed that it has nothing to do with normal straw sandals used in the normal way. You guessed right. This event involves only one sandal — which weighs close to two tons, is longer than 12 meters, and is paraded around town by groups of 40 people.

Parades aren’t all they do with Bigfoot, either. They also have three sandal race events, featuring teams of primary school students, women, and adult men.

Phase One of the festival got off on the good foot in early February when they made the other half of the giant sandal pair and offered it to the Haguro Shinto shrine. It’s like stepping into trousers — one foot at a time. The shrine is located on one of the three peaks of Fukushima City’s 275-meter-high Mt. Shinobu, which is often used as subject matter for waka poetry. The second was offered at the Ashio shrine after a day at the races and before being hung vertically from a steel pole with its mate. (The first character in the ashi of Ashio means foot, which may or may not be related.)

The festival took its current form in 1970 when the city government and the Chamber of Commerce decided to update a local custom at least 300 years old known as the Shinobu Sanzan Akatsukimairi, or the Dawn Pilgrimage to the Three Peaks of Mt. Shinobu. In the modern version, the sandals are offered as supplication for “healthy walking”. It’s held over two days, and in addition to the races and the parades, it includes both modern and traditional dancing.

Not only does it take the usual commitment to organize an event of that sort, it also takes about 2,000 bundles of straw, 10 rolls of bleached cotton, several green bamboo poles, and about 70 people working for roughly ten days to make one of the sandals. It also takes money, but that wasn’t a problem this year. Said one of the members of festival’s executive committee:

We thought we’d have a lot less money to work with (considering conditions in the prefecture), but local companies gave us a lot more help than we expected, and we also got contributions. Some companies even gave us more than they usually do.

There was one change in the procedures this year, however. More for the participants’ peace of mind than anything else, the executive committee measured the radiation levels at six points in three locations, as well as that of the straw, and publicly announced them. The straw was clean!

Here’s a short video showing some guys in traditional duds parading with the sandal in a downtown area, a few Shinto priests, and some sparkly young women doing a modern song and dance routine. It’s as good a visual metaphor for contemporary Japan as you’ll find anywhere.

Matsuri da! (116): One vine day

TUGS-OF-WAR are the main event at many Japanese festivals. As with the other competitions held as part of these Shinto rites, the winning person or team is traditionally considered to have earned the favor of the divinities. They or their residential district can look forward to good fortune in the coming year, such as a bumper crop or big haul of fish.

These competitions can be as intense as a street fight or outright gang warfare. The Kawachi Tug-of-War in Kagoshima is modeled after a military operation and originally had martial applications. As I explained in this post, “The rope is 365 meters long (400 yards), 35 centimeters in diameter (13.8 inches), and weighs five tons. About 3,500 men participate. That means the people on one team near the center line can’t see their own team members at the end of the line.”

As with tug-of-war pull-offs everywhere, most of these festival events use real ropes.

But not all of them.

The bravos doing the yanking in the Kazura Tug-of-War held every 15 August in Itoshima, Fukuoka, near the Dainyu Shirayama Shinto shrine use freshly cut vines. (Kazura in Japanese means vine). The Itoshimanians wake up early on the 15th, head to the local mountains for some vine chopping, and bring their prizes back to town for the afternoon event.

The vine/rope they tug is a manageable 37 meters long. About 80 folks showed up this year to watch the two teams, one consisting of seinen (people in their early 20s) and the other of a combination of kids and seniors. There are three matches. The kid/senior combination won the first, the second was a draw, and by tradition, the judge chopped the vine in half during the third match before the winner was determined.

Here’s the best part: The original idea is that one team is rescuing the recently deceased from falling into hell, while the other team are the demons trying to drag them down. Which team is which isn’t determined until the end, when the winners — this year, the kid/senior team — are declared the Buddha-gumi. After the match, everyone heads to a nearby beach. The losers of the demon-gumi throw their half of the chopped vines into the sea, and the Buddha-gumi uses their half to create a sumo ring. Then they have sumo matches on the beach to celebrate the ascension of the deceased to paradise. Gokuraku, gokuraku!

It’s just a small event in one neighborhood of a town of about 100,000, but look at how much they’ve got going on: Heaven and Hell, Buddha and the Demons, redemption and damnation, the mix of Shinto and Buddhism, the young and the old, the mountains and the sea…

And the good guys always win in the end!

Death be not proud

JAPANESE festivals can be more fun that a barrel of monkeys ripped on fermented fruit, but a Taiwanese folk custom, explained by anthropologist Marc Moskowitz, outdoes them all. The website Digital Dying interviewed the professor, and here’s the first question and answer:

What does a Taiwan stripper funeral look like?

Women sing and dance as a truck with blinking neon lights follows a funeral procession through the streets. The trucks are called Electric Flower Cars, or EFCs. Vendors sell things alongside and there is some really fabulous singing and a whole range of performances, taking off clothes is just one part. Often there’s a host, a middle aged man or woman who tells jokes and interviews performers between events. Usually the strippers wear bikinis, or an outfit like you might see at a nightclub.

Usually, but not always, as he explains in the interview.

Now that’s my idea of a going away party!

Of course it’s on You Tube. One caveat — the actual scenes from the documentary were filmed at a temple rather than a funeral. But as one of the commenters notes (Taiwan resident Dan Bloom, who knows what he’s talking about), the performances are the same.

Heck, if that’s what goes on at Taiwanese temples, I think I might have found religion.

There’s a more detailed interview at the io9 site with another trailer from the film. (It’s worth watching for the song’s subtitles alone.) And here’s Prof. Moskowitz’s site.

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Whale of a good time

Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you and remain silent.
- Epictetus

WE’VE ALL seen websites and blogs where people upload photos of food they cook at home or eat at a restaurant. I’ve never done that before — it never looks as appetizing as the bloggers think — but let’s give it a try and see what happens. For example:

Whale chirashizushi!

Whale nikujaga! (stewed meat, potatoes, and onion)

Deep-fried whale skewers!

Whale stewed in citron juice!

Whale tongue stew!

Smoked whale hors d’œuvre! (Meat and hide)

And this unidentified lip-smacker!

Or this!

And this one too!

Some dietary ideologues would never be happy unless they were unhappy that somebody somewhere might be enjoying these dishes, none of which I’ve eaten but all of which I’d try. I’ve always liked the whale I’ve been served, including the meals my wife cooked with whale as the main ingredient.

Some other ideologues wouldn’t be happy unless they were unhappy about those barbaric Japanese butchers cleavering away at the sacred cows of the sea.

Their bad. Those photos come not from Japan, but from Ulsan, South Korea, where the local whale festival was held at the end of May. An annual event more than 10 years old, the festival runs for three or four days and attracts upwards of 250,000 people. (See this previous post on the festival for more information.) The Ulsanians developed a taste for whale during the colonial days, which will make another group of ideologues happy by reminding them of the unhappy days before they were born, but — who cares!

The theme of this year’s festival was a whale cuisine exchange with Kumamoto in Kyushu, with which Ulsan has long had ties. The Japanese were happy to attend.

The woman at right is from Nagasaki, the woman in the center is from Kumamoto, and the two women at left are chums from Hokkaido, whale-chomping centers all. The woman dressed in the traditional chima chogori operates one of Ulsan’s 20 whale restaurants. (It’s not possible to give an accurate rendition of her name because it appeared only as Shin in katakana in Japanese.) In addition to her crimes against humanity by serving cannibal fare, she was also the food coordinator for the internationally successful South Korean television show Daejangeum, known in English as “Jewel in the Palace”. Here’s a summary of the program from the show’s website:

“The miniseries…is based on the story of a real historical figure (Jang-geum) who was the first and only woman to serve as head physician to the King in the rigidly hierarchical and male-dominated social structure of the Joseon Dynasty. Daejanggeum, in English, ‘the Great Jang-geum,’ caught the attention of Korean TV viewers with its unique combination of two themes: the successful rise of a female, which is rarely covered in historical genre, and the elements of traditional food and medicine.”

The series was very successful on cable in Japan, and it has been rebroadcast several times. One of the spin-offs was a cookbook featuring the dishes presented on the program, which the woman in the photo surely had a key role in compiling. The cookbook was also sold in Japan, though it probably contained no whale dishes.

Maybe it should have. The theme of the show was traditional food and medicine, and the red meat of the whale contains the dipeptide balenine, which some athletes now take in supplement form because it improves blood flow and restores resiliency to muscle after workouts.

The Ulsan — Kumamoto connection dates back to the late 16th century when Kato Kiyomasa, the first daimyo of the Kumamoto domain in Higonokuni, participated in Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of the Korean Peninsula. Kato built a castle in Ulsan (of which a few foundation stones remain) that became the model for the Kumamoto Castle, which he also built. The latter structure was finished in 1607, but most of it was torn down during the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. It has since been restored and is now a major tourist site.

Some workers from Ulsan helped build the Kumamoto version, and legend has it that the view from the hill on the southwest side of the castle reminded them of home. That’s how the district they spied later became known as Urusan-machi. The area is now part of Shin-machi after a municipal reorganization, but the Urusanmachi name survives as one of the Kumamoto City trolley stops:

Meanwhile, action on the Festivus Balaena front will shift to Japan later this summer, as the folks at the Sumiyoshi Taisha, a Shinto shrine in Sakai, Osaka, decided to revive their own whale festival. Both the facility and the event are as old as the hills, or perhaps in this case, as old as the waves. The shrine is celebrating its 1,800th anniversary this year, and it was already a millennium old when they began holding the whale festival, which dates from sometime in the Kamakura period. That ended in 1333.

The event has been held only sporadically since the Meiji Era (which began in 1868). Once upon a time, it was offered every 20 to 30 years. That’s unusual for Japanese festivals, most of which are annual affairs. This year’s revival, however, will be the first in 57 years. It is held in supplication for sea safety, and originated in a dance to placate the unhappy fisherman who came home empty-handed on whale-hunting expeditions. The Osakans thought it would be an excellent idea to bring it back as a way to help calm the waters after so many people died in the Tohoku tsunami this year. One of the advantages of such a long national history is that when something new is called for, it’s always possible to dive into the past and retrieve something old that most people didn’t know existed.

It’s been so long since the last time, however, that most everyone forgot how to do it. The Sakai municipal government worked with local historians to study photos and jog the memories of festival vets who were around during the last big blow in 1954. The main attraction is a 27-meter-long bamboo and cloth whale float, which is roomy enough for people inside to open and close the beast’s mouth, move its tail, and spurt water. Meanwhile, people alongside will chant the whale chant and dance the whale dance. Megafauna fans in Sakai will get to see all this on 24 July if they visit the shrine, and on 1 August when the leviathan is paraded from the shrine to the city.

Said one historian:

“I’m glad they’re bringing it back. Several generations now don’t know about the festival, but I want them to enjoy the vitality and spirit of fishermen of old.”

And while we’re on the subject of of big game hunting, some of the pretend buccaneer/junior ideologues of Sea Shepherd are in Japan to do what they do best — irritate the hell out of normal people — by traveling to Iwate to take photos of the dolphin hunt. Iwate’s local catch accounts for more than half of Japan’s dolphin and whale industry by tonnage. It is also one of the three prefectures most seriously damaged by March’s earthquake/tsunami. The Mainichi Daily News explains what happened:

“Earlier this month, the members took pictures of a fish market devastated by the disaster as well as fishing boats and posted the photos on the group’s website, triggering anger among some local fishermen over their return to the town.

“A local fisherman said, ‘Dolphin hunting is not done in May. Many boats were swept away due to the quake and tsunami, and the fish market is also in a terrible condition. There is nothing left to take pictures of.’”

We shouldn’t be too harsh on the swabbies — you know they’re determined not to be happy unless they can be really unhappy about whaling or dolphining. If they had something productive to do with their lives, they’d already be doing it. After all, it takes more than a few degrees of eccentric warp to think one is doing the world a favor by getting in the way while the people who suffered one of history’s greatest natural disasters are trying to rebuild their lives and homes.

If it’s pictures they want, I can’t help them with dolphins, but I could send them the link to the Japanese site promoting whale cuisine where I swiped the photos above. All they have to do is ask.

Afterwords:

It was entertaining to re-read the comments on my old post to which I linked above. It’s curious how some people aren’t happy unless they aren’t happy that other people are happy about living in Japan.

*****
The Sea Shepherd recruiting song

Matsuri da! (115): Rebirth

LIFESTYLE Luddites sporadically surface with the lament that globalization is holding a knife to the throat of indigenous cultures. Because cultures are less fragile and more resilient than they understand, however, this posture is really just a stalking horse for an unwillingness to allow the people of a particular place access to the same choices that globalization has allowed them. When the folk shed their colorful traditional garb for Western dress and develop a taste for musical styles other than those that rocked the world of their grandparents, it spoils the experience of enjoying them from afar, away from all the flies and the dysentery.

A look at the Japanese and their simultaneous embrace of their own traditions and the latest in global fashionability should be enough to improve anyone’s posture. The urban youth are just as likely as their fellows anywhere else to wear ugly untucked t-shirts, eat gloop, and listen to the unlistenable, but they are also just as likely to time slip without warning several centuries into the past to savor the celebrations of the ancients.

Earlier this month, for example, the Chokaisan Omonoimi Shinto shrine in the Fukura district of Yuza-machi, Yamagata — which dates from 871 at the latest — held its annual festival in supplication for a bountiful harvest. The event has several elements, including parades with three different mikoshi, or portable shrines. One of the mikoshi is for children, and another is in the shape of a ship that the carriers toss about to depict a sea voyage. The primary attraction, however, is the Hanagasa dance, or Fukura dengaku, a pre-planting rite. The dancers don headdresses with red decorations representing rice blossoms that rival anything worn by Carmen Miranda at the peak of her Hollywood career. Suspended from the brim are strips of paper called shide that represent the rain. Instead of castinets they provide clatter with an instrument called a sasara that for some reason is said to symbolize the croaking of frogs. At the end of their performance, the dancers toss the hats into the audience, and snatching one is supposed to guarantee good luck in the coming year. Anyone who’s been in the midst of a crowd in Japan during similar events knows the wisest course of action is to dive right in and grab one of your own. That’s beats being shoved roughly out of the way with an elbow to the ribs by somebody’s grandmother.

Though the festival dates from sometime in the Muromachi period, which ran from 1338 to 1573, and was designated an intangible prefectural cultural treasure in 1993, a look at this YouTube video featuring all the highlights is enough to see this isn’t a museum piece frozen in the aspic of the past.

In October 2007, the Yamagatans went on the road to Seoul to perform with other Japanese and Korean groups in the Japan-South Korea Exchange Festival, which you can see and read about here.

Teramachi Ichiza

Another of the benefits of globalization in Japan is the unexpected delights that result from all the mixing and mingling. One of the earliest manifestations of that was the chin-don bands, in which musicians dress in fanciful clothing to perform as a living jukebox stacked with global pop music on instruments both Japanese and Western, usually to advertise local shops. There are several excellent examples on-site that can be accessed at the tag below, but here’s another — Teramachi Ichiza from Iwate. The group, which usually works the Tohoku area, has won awards at national chin-don competitions for its performances. The members live in the mountainous part of the prefecture away from the coast, so they weren’t affected by the earthquake/tsunami, but they decided to suspend their activities after the disaster anyway in the spirit of self-restraint.

In the spirit of rebirth, however, they resumed performing in the Iwate city of Ofunato in the coastal area known as Goishi Kaigan at an event designed to buck up everyone’s spirits. (Enka megastar Sen Masao, an Iwate native, also sang.) The members of Teramachi Ichiza decided to bring their axes and blow because it had been 49 days after the earthquake. The 49-day Buddhist period of mourning originates in the Tibetan concept of bardo, the transitional period between one’s previous life and the consciousness’s entry into the life to come. Doesn’t that joyful noise contain an echo of the second line parade of brass bands in New Orleans switching from a dirge to jazz once they depart the cemetery after a funeral?

The chin-don band’s performance at Ofunato doesn’t seem to have been recorded, but their performance at the Miyako Horsehair Crab Festival in Iwate this February was.

This is what happened to Miyako one month later:

But destruction is not a permanent end. Doubters need only look to a small story at a park in a community center in the Kaminiida district of Yonezawa, Yamagata. A 300-year-old cherry tree on the center grounds collapsed last winter in the heavy snows. Before the deadwood could be cleared away in the spring, however, center director Nagaoka Takao spied shoots sprouting from the old trunk. He watered them with a PET bottle for the next two months. When cherry season arrived in the Tohoku region, so did the blossoms on the fallen tree.

Cultures included, we are all less fragile and more resilient than we sometimes think.

*****
The song, the scene, and the band’s name — they get it, too.

Matsuri da! (114): Angels with dirty faces

PARENTS LIKE TO THINK of their children as little angels—until they misbehave. Then they’re more likely to think of them as little devils.

The parents of young boys in Chikugo, Fukuoka, however, set aside one day a year during the O-Bon holidays to turn their sons into demons and made a festival out of it. O-Bon is a Japanese Buddhist custom in which the spirits of departed ancestors return to the family altars once a year, usually in mid-August. The folks in Chikugo take that opportunity to present the Hisadomi Bonzunahiki, held this year on the 14th. Here’s what happens: they round up the imps, paint their bodies black, dress them in straw skirts called mino, and tie some more straw around their heads with the ends loose to resemble two horns. Then they have the lads march around town with a 400-kilogram rope 30 centimeters in diameter and 20 meters long. If that doesn’t keep them out of mischief during summer vacation, nothing will. There were about 50 this year, and they covered roughly 3.6 kilometers in between their start and finish at the Hisadomi Kumano Shinto shrine.

This didn’t start as a Shinto festival, but it’s become an event that reflects the intersection of Buddhism with Shinto throughout Japanese history. It dates from 1626, when the ceremony was conducted marking the completion of the main building at the Tokuzui-ji, a local Buddhist temple. There is the story of the Buddhist saint Nichiren using a rope to pull his mother out of hell, where she had fallen, and the parishioners mimed the act. The Bonzunahiki (Bon rope pull) didn’t become a regular event until 1643, however. It was revived after two straight years of severe plagues and bad harvests left many dead, especially children. It’s been held every year since then, and was designated an intangible cultural property of the prefecture in 1996.

The boys don the black and straw so they can play the part of the guardians of the boiling cauldrons of hell. It’s so hot down there they work without much clothing, and the soot from the fires blackens their bodies. (It’s a wonder the straw doesn’t catch on fire, too.) The idea was that they could pull the spirits of the dead up from the netherworld for consolation, if only during O-Bon.

Though it’s nominally a Shinto festival, the Buddhist origins of the Bonzunahiki haven’t been forgotten. The organizers make a new rope every year, and the process involves suspending the rope from a beam inside a building. The beam used is not in the shrine, but one in the Kan’non temple on the western corner of the shrine grounds instead.

All this probably flies over the boys’ heads. One fifth-grader participating for the first time said he thought it was a lot of fun to get painted black. They also surely enjoyed getting hosed down to wash off the gunk and the sweat after carrying the rope through town.

After all, it’s hotter than hell this time of year in Japan!