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October 19, 2004

Matsuri means festival

Matsuri means festival. I think it should mean festival to the power of 10.

This past weekend was amazing. I was taken to a large festival at 11:45pm Friday night and then brought back home at about 6:30 in the morning. Then after 4 hours of sleep (chanting Yayusan! Yayusan! Sorre Sorre! in my dreams) I got up to attend the festivities in my own town. I regret that these photos can’t express the energy and the sound of it all, most especially the sound. Each float contains a set of drums complete with two small drummer boys. The people sing and chant and laugh and dance. The floats are called danjiri. Each one is owned and carried by local groups or neighborhoods. These things are beautiful, weighing in around 3 tons, ornately carved and painted. During the day the groups cart the danjiri around town stopping at houses and business that have made a donation for the privilege of a toast from the danjiri group. At night the danjiri dawn rows of candle lit lanterns (chachi) and battle. The men carry them on their shoulders, shouting, singing, and even making the whole thing jump up and down. They lift it higher, holding it by lower supports. More chanting and singing ensues until they build up the energy to lift it to arms length. Everyone gasps each time the floats invariably teeter to one side as they bring them down from such a great height. I was warned numerous times about the danger of these festivals, it seems that every so often someone is smashed or smothered to death. Once we arrived to the festival grounds and were sucked in by the seething mass of people and the swarms around the 40+ dangiri I understood why!
What my town didn’t have in size it made up for it in personalities. So many great people were out that day and that evening; people from my taiko team (did I mention I play with taiko drum team here?), so many of my students, good friends, good food, plenty of sake and “beru”, good times. In fact: unforgettable.

I’d love to explain this to you, but I don’t even know why they’ve got on frog caps. All in the name of fun.






The danjiri are an amazing show of team work and community. Light sticks go up in the air as two danjiri get close to colliding. Somehow the light sticks and whistles and shouting move the two danjiri in opposite directions. Only in Japan.






A view from up in one of the danjiri. The team let me up in it while they were taking a break and well… stocking up on drinks.






Back to Tanbara land, my town. This is a performance by some of the middle-school boys.



“We’ve been drinking all day!” they shout. Ok actually I had no idea what they were telling me, but they did put on a very cute reenactment of Star Wars with some of those above-mentioned light sticks.



Gotta love the miss-matched black and white tabbi-boots.



What is normally a dead street corner starts to fill up and light up.



They really are heavy, no joke, just check out the struggle illustrated on his face.



This is a mikoshi. It is larger than a danjiri, covered in golden embroidery, and if you thought lifting a 3 ton wooden shrine to arms length was impressive than you might keel over when you see them run at top speed with one of these things.






John and Duncan (two other JETs) and some of my students getting rowdy and taunting the other teams with a little chanting.






After heaving those massive floats around, what’s one single person's weight.

Posted by theinfonaut at October 19, 2004 12:43 AM

Comments

Posted by: Zach at October 19, 2004 01:24 AM

Posted by: josh at October 24, 2004 04:13 AM

Posted by: Fred at October 27, 2004 11:25 AM