THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

Buddy JK is visiting from America, and on Sunday morning, we pulled ourselves out of bed at the ungodly hour of 6:30 to catch a train, having gone to sleep only a few hours earlier thanks to travel delays following a trip to Kyushu (more on that next post).  With no time for coffee, much less breakfast, we rushed to the nearby town of Hasedera, which is fairly famous in the prefecture for its gorgeous temple and idyllic mountain setting.  From the station, we were whisked to the back of a local dango shop, where we dropped our bags, and moved up the mountain to a shrine for the opening ceremony of the Hasedera matsuri (festival).

At 9am, the first cup of sake was pressed into my hand for the opening ceremony toast.  Other JETs, thinking it was water (or happily cognizant that it was sake), gulped theirs down immediately, only to be informed that they were supposed to wait, and were then given refills.  Meanwhile, each person was issued his or her own happi coat, blue for the boys, and red for the girls.  The Year of the Dragon is quickly becoming the Year of Costumes.    

Happy in my happi coat

At about 9:30, the mikoshi was brought out.  Actually, two mikoshi.  First, the daddy mikoshi, which took almost 2 dozen men to move up the steep stairs to the shrine.  Inside the shrine were three young children, beating drums.  

The second mikoshi was far smaller, more Ark of the Covenant-sized, but it still weighed about 350-400 lbs, enough for 6-8 people to carry.  

The mikoshi

The opening ceremony involved lots of moving the mikoshi up and down stairs, bowing, dancing by the shrine maidens, and prayers by the priests.  During one prayer, a priest blessed us by waving a green branch over the crowds, and I had to fight the urge to cross myself, as one would in Catholic church.

Shrine maidens

Opening ceremony

After the sake toast, we made our way back down the stairs of the temple, and through the hilly, tortuous streets of Hasedera.  

Leaving the shrine

The rest of the day was a blur of chanting, shifts carrying the mikoshi, frequent stops for beer, soda, and cigarettes, and prayers at the smaller shrines throughout the town. Walking out of one shrine post-prayer, I spotted the three Shinto priests who had been tailing us on their scooters, standing in a circle in a small playground across the road, drinking beer. Later, I stumbled across them again in someone's home after lunch.  They decided to befriend me (their chattiness no doubt influenced by the small brewery on the table), which was charming. 

My new friends

Post lunch was when the wheels started falling off the wagon, so to speak. The participants had been broken up by height into teams.  The teams would rotate out in helping to carry the shrine for 10-20 minutes, which wasn't so bad until we hit this one area of town and all hell broke loose.  Part of the purpose of this festival is to gather donations from the locals by bringing the parade past the donors' homes.  When someone emerges with an envelope of cash, an organizer yells into a bullhorn "Itadakimasu!" and the team carrying the shrine then stops and hoists the shrine over their heads, chanting and pumping it into the air.  Unfortunately, we hit the jackpot in this one stretch, and moved only a matter of meters in between houses and businesses, stopping to carry out this ritual at least a dozen times.  More unfortunate still was the fact that this was during one of my group's rotations.  We were the short group, even by Japanese standards, and so hefting the shrine on our shoulders was one thing; raising the almost 400 lb monstrosity was another.  During our first ecstatic pump and chant, I got brained by one of the poles holding up the shrine.  Thankfully the guys were encouraged to assist us after that (the festival organizers clearly thought we weren't performing with enough panache), and we persevered, despite cries of, "Please! Stop giving us money!" emanating from the shrine bearers.

Don't be fooled. That's not a smile.  That's a grimace of pain.

Around 5pm, the festival drew to a close, the mikoshi was abandoned, and we were all allowed to limp off to the local onsen to recuperate before dinner. After a leisurely soak, we reconvened for the enkai (banquet party), which featured copious amounts of food, beer, sake, and the nightmare of all sober people when hanging out with drunks, karaoke.

Foreigners living in Japan quickly become aware that our worth is not necessarily based on our skills or our intelligence; rather, most of our value is derived from our ability to entertain the masses.  Japanese cultural events are a boon, not only because they teach foreigners about Japanese customs, but also because there is a certain glee inspired by seeing all of us dressed in traditional Japanese garb, or watching us react as we eat our first sea snail, or telling us to heft the mikoshi above our heads a few more times, just for giggles.  Sometimes being a spectacle is fun, other times, it's maddening.  Most of the time, we accept it as an inevitable trade-off in living in such a wonderful and fascinating country.  However, I think we outdid ourselves with our final karaoke number.  It was about 7:30pm, but it felt closer to 3am.  A discreet agreement was made following dinner that we should make our exit soon; however, no one wanted to offend our Japanese hosts.  Noticing the zeal with which each karaoke act was received, I suggested we sing a group number (and possibly dance, if we could manage to move our limbs), and have that be our grand farewell.  The final call was that we should sing the international classic, "YMCA."  We trooped up to the front, and quickly became a smash sensation.  People were gesticulating wildly, rhythmic claps shook the room, and some of the older men jumped on stage to dance with us and have their pictures taken with the Foreign Wonders.  Our duty done, we left the party to raucous applause, deep bows, and warm handshakes. 

Despite subsequent (facetious) comparisons to participating in the Hasedera matsuri and slavery, and the fact that I couldn't lift my arms above my head for two days and am still sore as I type this, it was, without a doubt, one of my top 2 days in Japan.  

OKAERI

Okaeri is a polite Japanese greeting that means "welcome home," but is not limited to your family or people you live with.  At the beginning of this summer, the obachans ("grandmothers") of the neighborhood started greeting me with "Okaeri" as I made my way home from school, instead of the habitual "Konnichiwa."  It only took a year, but I think this means I've been accepted into the tribe?  

48? WATERFALLS*

With the weather getting cooler, we are all eager to take advantage of being outside before winter hits and we go into hibernation.  To that end, Paul planned a day trip to the neighboring prefecture of Mie to visit Akameguchi, which is famous for its waterfalls.  We were lucky to venture out on a rainy and somewhat chilly day, which kept away most of the tourist hoards. Still, there were some intrepid hikers outfitted in their best mountaineering togs, looking as though they had just stepped out of a Patagonia catalog and were on their way to summit Mt. Fuji.  Keeping it simple in shorts and tennis shoes, we looked vastly less professional, particularly at a rest point, when the Japanese broke out their power bars and Nalgene bottles, while MR, one of the new Brits, bought a beer and a hot noodle stir fry to accompany his 6th cigarette of the day.  It was 10am.

The falls themselves were enchanting; so much so that I completely missed the fact that two 20-something Japanese photographers we encountered on the trail had brought with them a love doll (which is exactly what it sounds like), and were posing it in front of the falls.

*Apparently akameguchi can be translated as "48" or "many."  Turns out the advertising for 48 waterfalls was a bit misleading- the real number is closer to 35.

HIGANBANA MATSURI

In Japan, one of the harbingers of fall is the higanbana, or "red spider lily," which crops up everywhere like a fiery red weed.  This year, JETs were invited to participate in the higanbana festival, which consists of dressing up in costumes from the Nara period (circa 1300 years ago), and wandering through the hills of historic Asuka, which is considered the birthplace of Japanese culture.  The procession was more like a reenactment; there was a queen who sat atop a large shrine, which was then rolled along the trail.  The rest of us, Japanese and foreigners, made up the queen's entourage, shouting "Onaigi!" in unison, which I believe is something akin to "All hail!"  As foreigners, of course, we were relegated to wearing servants' clothes, which were a coarse cotton, compared to the shiny silks of the Japanese courtiers.  

The procession wending its way through the hills.  The higanbana are in the back.

The costume: a long-sleeved cotton under robe, topped by a heavier, long cotton robe and a long cotton skirt that made us all look like maypoles. 

Our homely garb did not discourage people- hundreds of people- from taking photos of us at every possible moment, including the two times we stopped for a brief break over the course of the 8 hour day.  Our fans were particularly amused to watch all of us guzzle cold tea and air ourselves out, hiking up our skirts in a distinctly unlady-like fashion (we all wore pants or shorts underneath).  Sometimes you just can't fight being foreign. 

The Queen's Court