Court nobles and Imperial guards represent the Fujiwara Period (897-1185), a time when the powerful noble family, the Fujiwara, controlled the governance of the country as ministers to the imperial court. One of the most powerful Fujiwara ministers was Fujiwara-no-Michinaga (966-1027). He arranged to have his daughters marry the emperors and have his grandson of one of these unions ascend the throne. In time the Fujiwaras’ power weakened and they had to rely more often on the warrior families, chiefly the Heike and the Genji, to control the country. Eventually, the Fujiwara would be succeeded by the military Heike family who in turn were destroyed by the Genji in the Gempei War.

Japan’s Imperial city on full display during Jidai Matsuri

Every year on Oct. 22, the city of Kyoto celebrates its long history with the Jidai Matsuri — “Festival of the Ages” — a long procession of participants dressed in the various fashions of Japanese history. The festival was created in 1895 to mark the 1,100 anniversary of the founding of Kyoto as Japan’s imperial capital.

On Oct. 22, 794, Emperor Kammu decided to relocate the imperial capital to what is today modern Kyoto. The imperial capital used to be 30 miles to the east in Nara, a city brimming with powerful, politically scheming Buddhist institutes. While the capital was in Nara (710-794) a certain amorous Buddhist priest nearly got himself named emperor by a lovesick empress. She died, however, before he could make his dream a reality and all the priest received was a swift banishment for his efforts. This incident and the strong influence of the Buddhist Temples on the imperial court, helped to prompt the move away from Nara.

The Imperial Court remained in Kyoto until 1867 when it was relocated to Tokyo. Kyoto was crushed by the news — even today some of Kyoto’s citizens will refer to Tokyo as the “new capital” despite the fact that all of Japan had been ruled from Tokyo since the beginning of the 17th century. Still, pride in their city is unflagging and a few decades later, Kyoto was seen celebrating its long and glorious history. In 1895, the Heian Shrine was constructed, which is a 2/3 scale model of the original imperial palace. The first Jidai Matsuri marked its opening.

Every Oct. 22 the ancient city hosts a spectacle of fire, smoke and noise

Visitors to Kyoto will find themselves in for quite a treat if they are in the city on Oct. 22 because two great festivals are held that day.

At noon the Jidai Matsuri (Festival of Ages) is held in central Kyoto. It’s a two-hour long procession depicting the various fashions and famous people from Kyoto’s long history. In the evening, the place to go is up to the mountain temple of Mt. Kurama to see the Kurama-no-Himatsuri — the Fire Festival.

Learning the ins and outs of matsuri culture begins at an early age, and even for Japanese students overseas, the drive and dream is evident.

In this photo from the Taipei Times, a group of children from the Taipei Japanese School carry a shrine at a children’s music festival.

One of the traditional events during the August O-Bon season in Japan is bon odori, or bon dancing. Women, usually middle-aged and elderly, dance on platforms erected in the middle of the street or on open lots. People of all ages do it during parades down the streets, often in groups from their place of employment—bank employees, school teachers, department store clerks…

It’s pleasant to watch, albeit rather tame. It involves waving your arms in the air, swaying to and fro, and following a pattern of steps. No shaking of hips or smacking of lips. All perfectly respectable.

But this article from the Daily Mainichi’s WaiWai, passing on information from the monthly magazine Cyzo, says that ain’t how it used to be in the old days. In a reverse of the usual trend, the now domesticated bon odori used to be a much wilder affair. So wild, in fact, that it was banned for indecent behavior.

I had to read more about this—with a strict scientific detachment for my matsuri studies, of course—and headed to the bookstore last month to get a copy of Cyzo, but they were sold out. Drat!

So I checked out some Japanese language sources on the Web and was surprised to discover there wasn’t a lot of information available on line about dirty O-Bon dancing. I did discover that there was a common perception a century or so ago that bon odori was synonymous with an orgy. Apparently, it was banned several times by the authorities, starting in the Edo Period, even earlier than the Cyzo article suggests, and not because foreigners were shocked.

It seems that the lewd bon odori was not a problem in the cities, but rather in the rural areas. Young people living out in the country had a hard time of it living on the land. They were usually poor and had few opportunities for socializing. In fact, early in Japanese history, there was the custom of tsumadoi in which women continued to live with their family after marriage. Their husbands paid them occasional conjugal visits. The women didn’t leave the household because their labor was needed on the farm.

New Year’s and summer festivals were one of the few opportunities for young men and women living in the sticks to get to meet each other, and the weather at New Year’s is not conducive to outdoor fun. People didn’t let their chance for summertime socializing go to waste, so bon odori in those days was just a quick prelude to finding a dark spot in the bushes.

This didn’t happen in the cities because people had more opportunities to mingle with the opposite sex. In fact, the custom of bon odori had died out entirely in the urban areas.

The WaiWai article notes that some of these customs have been handed down to modern times in different festivals. One of these festivals is the Shineri Benten Tataki Jizo in Niigata Prefecture’s Uonuma. During this festival, a special area is set up in which any woman who enters is liable to be pinched, and any man who pinches a woman is likely to be whacked on the shoulders.

This sounds like it could be so much fun that I just had to find out more.

Ah, so. I should have known. It turns out that the word shineri is derived from a combination of the words shiri, which are the buttocks, and tsuneru, which means to pinch. Tradition has it that the women who get pinched and the men who get whacked will have good fortune for the coming year. By all accounts, things get a bit rambunctious the night of the festival. I’ll bet.

Of course I scouted around for some photos, and I found some, too. I’ve posted one here—once again with a strict scientific detachment for the study of matsuri, of course. The children are sitting astride a shinten, which is the object at a Shinto shrine or festival in which the spirit of the divinity dwells. They dance around it during the festival. Why, did you think it was supposed to represent something else?

Now doesn’t this religious ceremony seem to be a more pleasant way to spend a summer evening with your children than going to a church supper?

In our previous matsuri reports, we’ve covered festivals with mikoshi races, mikoshi spinning, team competitions to smash mikoshi, groups charging down steep hillsides with a mikoshi at night, boat races, tug-of-war competitions with huge ropes, tug-of-war competitions with huge logs, drinking contests, fights to gain possession of balls, water splashing, and simulated sex. What else could possibly go on at a Japanese festival?

Dancing!

The three festivals we profile this week are all O-Bon festivals held roughly at the same time during the period from August 13 to 16, and all feature dancing. In fact, the whole point of the first and most famous festival, the Awa Odori festival of Tokushima, is to get ripped, get goofy, and dance. (If you’ve seen Jack Nicholson’s dance scene in Goin’ South, you get the idea.)

That’s exactly how it all began. The local feudal lord held a banquet to celebrate the completion of his new castle in 1587. Japanese parties can get just as crazy as parties anywhere else once the participants get a snootful, and on this occasion, everyone seems to have gotten their snoots very full indeed. They got drunk and started dancing, and the dancing was so wacky and so much fun they decided to do it every year. Now, instead of dancing in the castle, they form groups called ren and do it down main street.

They still get drunk, too, but nowadays most people wait until after the dances are over.

Each ren has from 50 to 500 people, and anywhere from 200 to 500 ren perform a day. The dances are done to a bright, fast-paced melody accompanied by shamisen, gongs, and flutes. The lyrics of the song go:

Odoru aho ni miru aho, onaji aho nara odoranya son son.

Or (very) roughly:
Fools watch the dancing fools,
Since we’re all fools, we might as well dance.

And don’t let the tradition of more than 400 years, fool you—one of the most important elements of the dance is spontaneity. The men are noted for letting it all hang out, while the women are more elegant. Once the official presentation is over, the spectators can join in the dance themselves, and the streets of Tokushima fill up with drunken, dancing Japanese.

Try this page for some more photos, all excellent. And this link reportedly has an mp3 file with the music, but I can’t confirm it with my antique computer.

The Awa Odori dancers wear traditional summer yukata, but the 20 or so men who do the Chankoko Dance on the island of Fukue off of Nagasaki Prefecture wear grass skirts, headgear decorated with flowers, and taiko drums around their waists. They dance in a circle and sing Omo omo onde, oniyamyode, omo onde. It’s anybody’s guess what that means, but some suspect it was originally a Buddhist sutra.

Most Japanese festivals are derived from Shinto, but this was originally a Buddhist dance to invoke deities, and has been performed locally for more than 800 years. The men proceed from house to house and are invited to dance at the homes of people whose relatives died in the past year. They also dance at Buddhist temples.

The name Chankoko is onamatopoetic and comes from the sound of the drums and gongs accompanying the dance. The unfamiliar lyrics and the atypical costumes suggest its origins lie outside of Japan, perhaps in islands further south.

Finally, there is the Kujira Odori, or Whale Dance, of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture. The first recorded whale hunters in Japan are from this municipality, and every year during the O-Bon season they perform a dance that mimes whale hunting. It has been performed for more than 300 years as a prayer for a good catch.

The dancers, singers, and drummers are known for their colorful clothing. They wear happi coats with red, white, and blue horizontal stripes, red headbands, yellow sashes, and white trousers. The dancers carry hollowed bamboo tubes that are about 50 centimeters long and filled with pebbles. The tubes are wrapped with tape of three different colors and have red tassels on the ends. The dancers shake these tubes while they dance their way onto the bow of a ship. Each of the colors is symbolic: black represents the whales, red stands for the red snapper (a fish), green is for the land, and white is for the waves.

Three dance festivals (out of dozens) held during the same week every year: one in celebration of getting drunk and dancing, another from the South Pacific with men in grass skirts, and a third celebrating whaling. Where else in the world will you find such simultaneous variety in folk traditions? And this in a country reputed for its homogeneity.

The festival season in Japan reaches a climax this week, and so many events are being held throughout the country it would not be possible to describe them all in a short post. One famous event was held this Tuesday, and though it is not a festival, it is too spectacular to overlook.

That is the Daimonji Okuribi, in which huge bonfires are set ablaze on five mountains surrounding Kyoto every August 16th at the end of the O-bon period. During O-bon, the spirits of a family’s ancestors are said to return to the family home. Traditionally, they were sometimes greeted with mukaebi, literally “welcoming fire”, and sent back to the spirit word with okuribi, or “seeing off fire”. “Daimonji” means “the kanji character dai“, which itself means great or large.

And that’s exactly what happens—the folks in Kyoto burn words and pictures into the mountainsides. The media and the tourist guides always show the dai character (as in this photo), but more that one hillside is set on fire that night. There are also bonfires on four other mountains—two parts of the same mountain have the two kanji for myoho, or Buddha’s Law, another mountain has a smaller dai kanji, a bonfire in the shape of a ship burns on a fourth mountain, and the last bonfire is in the shape of a torii, the gateway to Shinto shrines.

These fires are large enough to be seen throughout the city. Each kanji stroke ranges from 80 to 160 meters in length. Pine branches are used to set the fires, and there are 75 separate fire sources for the larger dai kanji alone. That figure is ignited at 8:00 p.m., with the others following immediately after. One can imagine the length of preparation time required, but the flames themselves die out in about 30 minutes. This is another example of the Japanese appreciation for fleeting beauty—the peak time for cherry blossom viewing in the spring is also very short, for example. They consider this combination of beauty and brevity to be a metaphor for human life itself.

Smaller bonfires have been lit at homes to see off ancestors for many centuries, but the mountainside bonfires in Kyoto are said to have originated with the Buddhist monk Kobo Daishi, who suggested the practice as a prayer to ward off illness. That would date the start of the event in the early 9th century. This year, an estimated 120,000 people turned out to watch.

Kobo Daishi, by the way, is a formidable figure in Japanese history. Also known as Kukai, he traveled to China to study esoteric Buddhism and returned to establish monasteries and meditation centers in the Kyoto area. He founded the Shingon sect, is credited with inventing the kana syllabary (the Japanese use two alphabetical systems in addition to kanji), originated the 88 temple pilgrimage in Shikoku (second photo), created poetry, calligraphy, and sculpture, built lakes, founded a school, and compiled the oldest extant dictionary in Japan.

That’s a lot of activity to pack into one life, but Kobo Daishi also was known for his extreme ascetic practices–which likely freed up a lot of spare time!

Most Japanese festivals originate from Shinto observances, but that’s not always the case. Any old excuse is fine for the folks in this country to get together for a summertime party, as was shown by two events this past week.

One was the Ginowan Hagoromo Festival, held in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture. The people of Ginowan dress up in costumes and hold a parade recreating the period of a local folk tale. Legend has it that an angel descended from heaven to a pond in Ginowan to take a bath. While she was bathing, a local farmer hid her wings, preventing her return. One thing usually leads to another in a boy-meets-girl story, and this one is no exception. The farmer and the angel got married and had a son. The couple didn’t live happily ever after, however—she discovered her wings by accident one day and flew back to heaven.

The festival is also noted for its kachaashi contest. The kachaashi is a local folk dance anyone can perform. All you have to do is stick your arms up in the air and rotate your palms in time with the music. The footwork is left up to the dancer. The appeal of this particular dance is that anyone can join in and enjoy themselves, but talented dancers can turn the simple form into something both elegant and vivacious, encouraged by the hand clapping and interjections of traditional Okinawan whistling. (The pattern of sounds they make is traditional, but their whistling technique is the same as the good old American method of making a circle with one finger and the thumb and sticking them in the mouth.)

The individual competition featured 117 participants, and the winner declared, “Kachaashi is a free dance for sharing happiness. I hope more and more people do the dance.” A group competition also was held, and this year 30 teams vied for top honors.

Meanwhile, there must have been a big noise in Okaya, Nagano Prefecture, this week during the 36th Okaya Taiko Festival. The program starts with groups of taiko drummers and dancers parading through the city on floats. As it gets dark, they gather at a specially built 60-meter-wide stage for special performances of drumming and singing. The climax occurs with 300 drummers appearing for a simultaneous performance. I’ve seen taiko performances with as many as 10 drummers, and they were quite loud enough. I can’t imagine what it must have sounded like with 300 drummers pounding away at once. Reports say that the drums can be heard throughout the city, and I’m sure that’s no exaggeration.

The people in Okaya must really like whacking things with sticks to make music—they’ve also sponsored the World’s Marimba Festival for the past few years, where the musicians perform pieces ranging from traditional Japanese folk melodies to Debussy!

It’s said that Japanese people tell ghost stories in the summer in order to provoke a shiver during months of oppressive heat. If this doesn’t cool you off, but you’re looking to commune with the spirits during O-Bon and can spare the time, you may want to check out the Shigeru Mizuki Museum in Sakaiminato, Tottori Prefecture.

Although Mizuki is probably best known in Japan as the creator the the popular Ge Ge Ge No Kitaro series of manga and anime, the illustrator and artist has also gained reknown and respect for his efforts to document the various supernatural creatures, or yokai, that inhabit the different parts of Japan. Mangajin maintains an excellent online description of Japanese ghosts here.

Born in 1922, Mizuki attributes much of his interest in Japanese ghosts and goblins to Sakaiminato, his home town, which he depicts in his work as a gothic and gloomy place, typical of many of the small fishing towns that line the Japan Sea coast.

Conscripted into the Japanese army, Mizuki lost an arm during the war and was forced endure incredible hardship in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, and the experiences of the horror of war, combined with his exposure to the animist beliefs of the indigenous population where he was stationed, also contributed to the tone of his work. He also has published a series of manga that describes what it was like to fight Australians and Americans in Melanesia, as well as a series of books about the history of post-war Showa Japan.

The Shigeru Mizuki Museum doesn’t have an English page (and, like many Japanese webpages, is fairly difficult to navigate), but the town itself has devoted a webpage to the museum. In fact, Sakaiminato has created a Mizuki Shigeru Road that features bronze statues of many, if not all, of the ghosts and ghouls that appear in Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro, as well as many other popular Japanese monsters. Click the black bullets that line the route for a pop-up image of each statue.

A short, fascinating interview, in English, with Shigeru Mizuki can be found here.

For another manga artist influenced by Mizuki (but tends to document human rather than supernatural ghouls), be sure to check out Yoshiharu Tsuge.

I’ve had a busy weekend, so unfortunately there isn’t enough time to file a full matsuri report, but I would be remiss if I failed to mention one festival held this week. That would be the Kanto Festival in Akita City from the 3rd to the 6th. It is one of the three major festivals of the Tohoku (northeastern) region, and it has been designated an important intangible cultural asset by the national government. More than one million people turn out to witness the spectacle every year.

The festival took on its current form during the middle part of the Edo period (which would be sometime in the 18th century) as a midsummer event to drive away the evil spirits and pray for a bountiful harvest. It is one of many lantern festivals in Japan, but none of the others are quite like this one. Men clad in traditional happi coats carry 235 poles filled with a total of roughly 10,000 lanterns down the city’s main street. Each pole holds up to 46 lanterns on crossbars. The poles are 12 meters high and weigh 50 kilograms each.

The men do not carry them on special belts, such as those worn by the people who carry flags in parades. No—they balance them on their hips and foreheads, encouraged by shouts of “Dokkoisho!” by the crowds lining the street.

And this is what it looks like:

Every one of the festivals in today’s report was held in northern Kyushu last weekend, the first weekend after summer vacation began for Japanese schools.

Hita Gion Festival

Now designated an important intangible cultural asset by the national government, the Hita Gion Festival (right) in Hita, Oita Prefecture, dates back to 1714 in its present form. The festival is held to pray for protection against illness and disasters caused by the weather. It features a parade of nine elaborate floats whose decorations are based on themes from kabuki stories. These floats are paraded through the town both during the day and at night. They are not merely lifted and taken from one spot to another—the men doing the carrying rotate them and raise them up and down as they proceed. The people of Hita think the hayashi, or musical accompaniment, performed with flutes, taiko drums, and shamisen, is different from others performed in Japan. At the top of the page of this Japanese-language link is WAV file that will give you a sample of the music. You’ll quickly recognize it from the moving musical notes. This link has several photos taken in the daytime at the 1995 festival

Hamasaki Gion Festival

The folks in the Hamasaki district of Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, a coastal town on the Sea of Japan, also have a Gion festival on the same day. Their festival dates from 1753, when a local merchant visited the Gion shrine in Kyoto on business. Passing through Hakata on the way back, he saw the excitement generated by their Gion festival and organized one for Hamasaki. It’s held to pray for protection against illness and for a rich harvest.

There are three floats, built separately and maintained by groups of local fishermen, businessmen, and farmers. Each float is 15 meters high and weighs about five tons, making them among the biggest of any used in Kyushu festivals. The people in Fukuoka reduced the size of their floats with the advent of overhead power lines and stoplights, but in Hamasaki, they’ve decided to keep the height of the floats the same and plan the parade route to avoid any obstacles. It takes 150 men to lug one of these bruisers around town.

The floats are rebuilt every year, and the decorations are based on famous scenes from traditional stories. The Hamasaki festival uses more than 10 hayashi tunes, performed with flutes, taiko drums, bells, and shamisen. There are subtle differences in the tunes played by the musicians on each float, and they change the tune depending on the road conditions. Slower numbers are played when going up hills, and the tempo picks up whenever they round curves.

The highlight comes late at night when the three floats converge on the shrine grounds after their parade through town. The lanterns on the floats are lit and the floats are spun around dozens of times, creating the effect of rings of fire against the backdrop of the night sky. After the festival, the groups responsible for each one completely disassemble them—they will have disappeared by the next morning. Work on the floats for the following year’s festival will begin in six months and finish about two days before the festival starts.

The Omuta Daijayama
Omuta is a former coal-mining town in southern Fukuoka Prefecture, not that far from Karatsu. The festival in its current form is a combination of several local festivals, the oldest of which is the Daijayama Festival thought to have originated sometime between 1640 and 1791. This festival is known for its floats of sea serpents, said to be the symbol of the water god. In later years it was combined with the elements of a Gion festival conducted for the gods of agriculture and as protection against illness.

The big attraction is the sea serpents, however. Each of the six floats is six meters high, 10 meters long, and they require the efforts of 200-300 people to pull through the city. The first part of the festival presents townspeople performing bon odori, the traditional summer festival dances, but the highlight comes after it gets dark. The floats are assembled in one location after their parade through the city. The float carriers start shaking them wildly, and then the serpents’ mouths open to emit multicolored fireworks and smoke. Legend has it that any children bitten by a serpent’s tooth will be guaranteed a healthy, accident-free year.

Years ago, the floats were torn apart at the end of the festival and there was a mad scramble for the serpents’ eyeballs, said to bring good luck. (The Japanese traditionally didn’t mess around during these activities; people used to get killed.) Nowadays, however, a smaller ceremony for getting the eyeballs is held only for children. The floats themselves are still destroyed, and the eyeballs are offered to the divinities at the local shrine. People hang scraps from the destroyed floats on the eaves of their homes to ward off illness and protect the household for the coming year.

The Tobata Gion Festival

The Tobata festival in Kitakyushu, also in Fukuoka Prefecture, dates from 1803. It was held to pray for good health, as a plague struck the area the year before. It has a unique aspect that is shared by few, if any, festivals in Japan.

During the daytime, the four festival floats are paraded around the city decorated with pennants. This is what they look like:

At 7:30 p.m., the floats are returned to a predetermined spot. On a signal, the men responsible for each float swiftly remove the banners and other decorations and strip the floats down to their frames. After columns and crossbars are installed, the floats are decorated with 12 rows of 309 lanterns to form a pyramid. The entire process takes only about 20 minutes from start to finish. The parade starts again, this time with the floats being carried by 50 or 60 men each, accompanied by the hayashi festival music and shouts of “Yoitosa, yoitosa!”

And here’s what the floats look like then:

Last week we reported on the teams of beefy, husky guys racing one ton floats down the streets of Hakata. Men are usually the ones to carry the load in Japanese festivals, but one exception is the Tenjin Matsuri held on the 23rd this week in Osaka. A total of 78 women grunted and groaned together to manhandle two 200-kilogram mikoshi around the city’s Nishi Ward.

This year was the event’s 25th anniversary, which means it’s still a mere babe as far as Japanese festivals go–the matsuri here are usually centuries old. The so-called “mikoshi girls” included mothers and daughters pairing up and putting their shoulders into it, chanting “Wasshoi, wasshoi!” as they covered the four-kilometer course. Japanese women dressed like that carrying a mikoshi? I’d probably fall in love with half of ‘em before the second group passed by.

Another festival in which the participants carried floats through the town took place this week in Omihachiman, Shiga Prefecture. This event, the Gion Festival, has a riper heritage, having been started in 1670 to ward off illness. The six floats carried a television star, dolls, and rooster decorations at the top and were paraded for an hour. The photo shows about 20 primary school students playing the hayashi festival music on wooden flutes in front of the floats lined up at the Tsushima Shrine.

The Japanese have devised many creative ways to cope with their hot and sweaty summers over the years—including praying for relief. One of the attractions of Kyoto’s O-Suzumi Festival this week was the two ice pillars placed in front of the Jonan-gu Shrine. Festival participants who touch the ice will be protected from the ill effects of the heat. Each of the ice pillars is about one meter high and weighs 130 kilograms. There’s no word on how long it took them to melt–temperatures reached a high of 34.6 C in Kyoto on festival day.

Visitors also were treated to a performance of kagura, sacred Shinto music frequently heard at festivals. After the performance, the visitors flocked to the 100 stalls set up on the shrine grounds until late at night. This scene resembles the small community fairs we had in my American town growing up. Some of the stalls offer food and refreshments, including fried octopus and barbecued corn-on-the-cob, while others offer games, such as kingyo sukui. This literally means “goldfish scooping”, an activity in which younger children scoop small goldfish out of a trough to take home in a plastic bag.

Events almost identical to this (without the ice pillars) are held most every night during summer vacation throughout Japan. Women wear their yukata, or summer kimono, for a hot night of fun. (Notice I didn’t say a night of hot fun.) The multicolored fabrics are woven into so many attractive and striking designs it looks like a botanical garden come to life. Meanwhile, men clomp around in their geta, or wooden clogs, and everyone slurps on snow cones, soft ice cream, or other refreshments. It’s not thrilling or exciting, but it’s not meant to be—it’s just a pleasant and colorful way to forget about the heat and spend some time outdoors.

If you were lucky enough to be standing outside of the Kushida Shinto Shrine in Fukuoka City at 4:59 a.m. last Friday, here is what you would have seen:

That was the start of the Oiyama, the grand finale of the Gion Yamakata Festival held every year from July 1st to the 15th. The photo shows the first of the eight teams carrying kakiyama (floats) leaving the shrine for a breakneck run over a five kilometer course through the city. And when I say run, I do mean run—the teams compete to cover the course in the fastest time.

These teams are called nagare (which means “flow” in Japanese), and the members of each team are selected from a specific region in the city, which has a population of more than one million people. The city was divided into regions for the festival nagare in 1587—when the event was already more than 300 years old.

The Yamakata Festival originated around 1241, when the priest Shoichi, the founder of Joten-ji (a Buddhist temple), was carried around the town of Hakata on a mikoshi, or portable Shinto shrine, spreading holy water. He is said to have saved the town from a plague.

These floats are made by hand by the famed traditional doll makers of Hakata (another name for the city). Weighing about a ton, they’re carried on the shoulders of 26 men from each of the teams. It’s not possible to expect 26 men to carry that load for five kilometers, so there are substitutions along the way from among the several hundred men on each team. Four men are stationed at each corner of the float for steering, and many of the team members help by pushing from behind.

The spectators lining the street—an estimated 170,000 this year—cheer them on during their mad dash and splash water on the nagare to cool them off in the hot Hakata weather.

Centuries ago, these floats were 15 meters high, but their height was reduced in 1910 to avoid any problems from running into railroad overpasses and electrical wires. The race was cancelled in 1945 because they were worried about air raids, but they resumed in 1948.

The race is the culmination of two full weeks of activities, which include public displays of the floats, several practice runs, and a trip to City Hall to thank officials for allowing them to run around the city for two weeks.

By this time, you may be wondering who would want to get up in the middle of the night in the summer to carry a one-ton load on their shoulders at a dead run through the city. Not only that, the team members must give up sex AND cucumbers during the two-week period. But the only way to join a team is by invitation, and they have no trouble finding members. The benefits include the almost unlimited ability to take off from work during the festival period, and the many meetings and parties with other team members, during which copious amounts of alcohol are consumed. And who knows, maybe there are Yamakasa groupies who are just waiting for the ban on sex to end on July 15th.

While the Yamakasa Festival was being held in Fukuoka City at the northern end of Kyushu, the Rokugatsudo was underway down in Kagoshima City at the southern end of the island. If you were lucky enough to be at the Terukuni Shinto Shrine at that city on either Friday or Saturday night, you would have been part of this:

The festival got its start when the 19th feudal lord of the local Shimazu clan, Mitsuhisa, donated a lantern at the local temple as a prayer for children and protection from illness. (Mitsuhisa is also known for building Sengan-en in 1659. This 16.5-hectare garden was at the daimyo’s second home. Now a public park, it has a magnificent view of Kinko Bay and Sakurajima, a small island with an active volcano that lies in the bay near the city. I’ve been there, and it is no exaggeration to say the view is magnificent.)

Taking their cue from the feudal lord, many of the local townspeople donated lanterns of their own and lit them, starting the festival tradition. Rokugatsudo literally means June lanterns. (The event began in June when the lunar calendar was in use.)

The paper lanterns are lit every night during the 15-day period from July 1 to July 16 at different shrines and temples throughout the city, with the biggest single event being the one held at Terukuni on the nights of the 15th and the 16th. That event features large, 2.5 meter-wide lanterns and about 1,000 smaller individual lanterns lining the main path to the shrine.

The event is largely conducted by neighborhood associations and children’s groups, and most of the lanterns are handmade. The city sponsors a big fireworks display, performers dance on stage, and there are the usual stalls selling fried octopus and other Japanese summertime festival treats. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people turn out every year.

While the most spectacular festivals may have been in Kyushu, there were several festivals in Mie Prefecture that were smaller and more down-home, but every bit as fun. One was the Osatsu Tenno Whale Festival, held in Osatsu-cho, Toba, on the 14th. Local youth groups and students from primary and secondary schools parade with two mikoshi modeled after whales. Mikoshi are portable Shinto shrines; the idea is that the spirit of the local shrine divinity is inside. The whale mikoshi in Osatsu-cho symbolize parent and child.

The whales aren’t the only attraction. There are marching bands, floats featuring characters from the Urashima Taro fable, traditional music and dancing, and again, onlookers lining the street splashing water on the participants to help them beat the heat

Maybe the guys in the Ishiki region of the prefecture could have used some water splashing to cool themselves off during the annual Zaruyaburi festival, held this week at the Ishikia and Yakumo shrines. About 70 or 80 young men participate in a so-called naked festival to battle each other for control of a zaru basket. The one who ends up with the basket will have good luck and health during the year. A naked festival is not quite as dangerous as it sounds—during most naked festivals in Japan, the men wear traditional loincloths similar to those worn by sumo wrestlers, so they don’t have to worry about shots to their pawnshop while they grapple for the basket.

I think the women of Mie Prefecture have a better idea for competing than getting naked and fighting over some basket. They choose to dive for abalone instead. The Shirongo Shrine’s Shirongo Festival was held this week on a day when catching fish is normally prohibited. At the sound of a note from a triton horn, the women dive into the water simultaneously and compete to be the first to catch an abalone. The women who catch the first male and female abalone offer them at the shrine to pray for safety sea journeys and an abundant catch.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating—Japanese festivals are the best free public entertainment anywhere in the world.

It’s been a while since our last festival report, and with the season of the really big Japanese festivals about to begin, now’s the time to resume. One of the biggest is the Hakata Gion Yamakasa Festival in Fukuoka City, which features a series of events from July 1-15. One of the preliminary events is the Zennagare Oshioitori, which was held on the 9th. The nagare refers to the seven teams of about 500 men each who will pull the immense wheeled floats through the city on the 15th.

In this ceremony, the men in the nagare head to Hakozaki Beach in the city’s Higashi Ward to get the o-shioi, which is sand for purification. (Whenever the men go outdoors during the two-week period of the festival, they sprinkle the sand on their body to purify themselves and prevent illness or disaster.) At the beach, they wade into the water up to their knees and place the sand in boxes carried on poles. They later go to the Hakozaki shrine in the same ward and pray for safety during the festival period (the scene in the photo). On the 10th, they start maneuvering the wheeled floats. The main event on the 15th is a stunning spectacle, and I plan to have more on that next week.

Meanwhile, the Doronko Festival was held in Ehime Prefecture on the 3rd. With a 120-year tradition, the festival is conducted at a rice paddy in a Shinto shrine after the local paddies are planted to thank the divinities and pray for a good harvest. This festival is a virtual variety show of performances. These include young men who pantomime planting soybeans, and wind up throwing each other into the mud and wrestling with each other. (Doro means mud in Japanese.) There’s a lineup of 10 trained bulls in a row plowing the muddy rice field. There are shrine maidens who pantomime planting the rice paddies (preceded into the muddy paddies by men playing drums). One character in a demon’s mask pulls three people into the mud to the accompaniment of gongs and drums. The shrine maidens, dressed in colorful costumes, perform a dance on platforms above the paddy before the planting ceremony. There are several photos of these events to choose from, and I’ll choose the photos of women in colorful costumes dancing every time over pictures of hair-legged guys wrestling in the mud.

Finally, Tanabata Festivals were held throughout the country on the 7th. This festival originated as a combination of Chinese and Japanese traditions. There was a Chinese legend that the Weaver Star (Vega) and the Cowherd Star (Altair) were actually lovers who could meet only once a year on the seventh night of the seventh lunar month. (Was the cowherd the seventh son of a seventh son, I wonder?) This blended with a Japanese legend about the celestial weaving maiden Tanabatatsume, who made clothing for the gods. The festival was observed by the imperial court in the past.

In most cases, the modern Tanabata Festivals include a display of bamboo branches hung with strips of colored paper and other ornaments. People write their wishes or romantic requests on the paper before hanging them on the bamboo.

The photo here is of these bamboo branches decorating a city street in Kizu-cho, Kyoto Metropolitan District. This is one of the local events leading up to Kyoto’s Gion Festival (which is also coming up soon), and was begun to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Kizu as a municipality. The street is closed to automobile traffic for 750 meters. Twenty-five groups sponsor the branches, ranging from financial institutions to nursery schools, and the most attractive are awarded prizes.

The wish I stuck on a bamboo pole near my home is to meet one of those dancing shrine maidens in Ehime!

Herodotus once observed that “All is custom.” As an example of what he meant, someone explained that it is as contrary to custom in Paupua to bury one’s dead as it is in California to eat them.

This is particularly true for religious ceremonies worldwide. As we’ve pointed out here before, more than a few local Shinto festivals in Japan celebrate the brewing and consuming of sake, all done with the blessing of the priests at the Shinto shrine. Try to imagine this happening at some of the standard brand religious institutions elsewhere in the world–particularly mosques.

But even the most indulgent people who might overlook a boozy night at a religious festival by allowing that all is custom might be nonplussed if they saw some of the more extreme practices that still occur at a few Shinto festivals in Japan.

For the past several months, we’ve been reporting on the festivals that are held every week in Japan. It’s not difficult to do the research; the Google and Yahoo! search functions turn up plenty of stories from newspapers on line. But there’s one festival that a newspaper wouldn’t dream of covering.

That’s the Asuka Onda Festival, held the first Sunday in February every year at the Asukaniimasu Shrine in Asuka-mura, Nara Prefecture. The reason you’ll never read about this festival in a newspaper is that the central event is the simulated performance of the sex act on stage in front of an audience.

This is one of the oldest Shinto festivals in Japan. There are written records mentioning the festival during the reign of the Emperor Temmu, which lasted from 673 to 686, and it likely predated that.

Three masked mythological characters appear in the performance. The first is the Tengu (first photo), half-man and half-bird, with a large, phallic nose. The Tengu have represented both harmful and helpful characters over the years, some kidnapping children or tormenting Buddhist priests, while others helped people. Legend has it they taught swordsmanship to the samurai.

The second is the female Otafuku (second photo). In ancient mythology, Otafuku’s dance brought out the sun and brightened dark skies. The character suggests health and good humor. Finally, the Okina (third photo) is an old man who has risen above life’s struggles to attain lasting fulfillment.

In this particular performance, the Tengu and Otafuku are husband and wife. This festival was originally performed on the lunar New Year, which in Japan was considered the first day of spring. The connections with fertility and new growth are apparent, and the ancient Japanese believed that sexual energy has the power to disperse evil spirits and bad influences.

The performance begins early in the morning with the appearance of the Tengu and Okina in the road. They begin chasing people, whacking some on the butt at random with bamboo sticks. No one gets upset; the act symbolizes the driving away of evil spirits and arousing the spirit of life after a long winter. It is a harbinger of spring, and legend has it that the greater the commotion they cause, the better that year’s harvest will be.

After the Tengu and Okina withdraw, the sound of taiko drums signals the start of a more solemn part of the ceremony, as the Shinto priests offer food to the deities. When the ceremony is concluded, the Tengu and the Okina return, leading a man dressed in a cow costume walking on all fours. They mime the plowing of a rice paddy on a platform in front of one of the shrine buildings. Their performance at this point combines shrieks of fright and laughter, as they purposely slip and fall from the platform and then begin to dance with the onlookers, hamming it up the whole time.

The three characters depart again, and a second taiko drum signal announces the return of the priests, who perform a service representing the planting of the rice paddies. They place pine branches upright into the earth on the platform. When this ceremony is completed, they throw the branches at the audience members below, who scramble to grab them. (And when I saw scramble, I mean it–no one who has seen Japanese behavior at events such as these would still think they were the world’s politest people. You either go for the branch or get out of the way fast.) The lucky recipients place the branches in their own rice paddies because they are said to drive away harmful insects.

A third taiko drum signal announces the return of Tengu and Okina with the Otafuku character (played by a young man). Otafuku is wearing a red cloth around her hips, which she flicks suggestively as she shakes her body in the throes of passion. The excitement is contagious and is soon conveyed to the crowd, who encourage her to greater heights. The Tengu grabs her by the shoulders and they simulate sex standing up; he still has a bamboo stick in one hand, and he swings it at anyone in the audience impertinent enough to laugh.

The Okina then presides at their mock wedding ceremony. (It seems that preserving virginity for marriage was not an important tradition in Japan.) After offering large bowls of rice to the Shinto priests, the Tengu quietly takes out a bamboo tube and places it in his crotch (fourth photo). After teasing the priest with this phallic symbol by flashing it around his nose, the Tengu opens the tube and pours out sake. (They don’t miss a trick, do they?) He places the tube back in his crotch and waves it at the audience.

Otafuku then lies down on the stage and the Tengu mounts her to perform another extremely realistic simulation of sex. First-time viewers are reportedly stunned into silence at this point, but after a while start laughing and cheering on the performers. Meanwhile, Okina hovers around the couple playing the comedian and generally acting goofy.

When Tengu and Otaku finish, they take out pieces of paper from their costumes, pantomime wiping their crotches, and throw the paper at the crowd. (Bet you thought they couldn’t top themselves, eh?) They repeat this several times, and the people in the audience again scramble for the paper; legend has it that if they use the paper that night themselves, they will conceive a child.

Japanese scholars report that despite the frank behavior of the performers, the performance itself is not lewd, but rather innocent and even healthful in its own way. They point out the ancients thought sex was neither embarrassing nor something to be hidden; on the contrary they respected the tremendous energy of the sex drive and thought it led to peace and prosperity. In fact, they characterize the ceremony as being a kind of prayer.

They may have a point. Imagine what the rest of the world would be like if ceremonies such as this were held annually at churches, temples, and mosques. I’d almost consider converting to Shintoism, if such a thing were possible.

We periodically report on the many festivals held in Japan, but an article in the Nishinippon Shimbun about the Yongdungje Festival on the island of Chindo at the southwestern tip of South Korea described an event so intriguing I thought it was worth including here.

Also known as the “Mysterious Sea Path Festival” the event will be held this year from July 22 to 25. The main attraction is the phenomenon of the parting of the seas. Visitors follow in the footsteps of Moses by walking on the seabed from the village of Hoidong 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 40 meters wide.

This phenomenon first attracted widespread attention in 1975 when the French ambassador to South Korea visited Chindo and saw the sea part with his own eyes. He was so excited he wrote an article about it for a French newspaper and called 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. It also became well known in Japan after enka singer Yoshimi Tendo had a hit song about it called Chindo Monogatari (The Chindo Tale). Tours from Japan to Chindo 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 sea begins to part, the locals 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.

A temporary stage is set up during the festival for performances of kanggangsullae (a folk dance performed by women on the night of the eighth full moon) and tashiraeki (a drum performance to console relatives of the deceased), both of which have been designated as important immaterial 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 Chindo 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 in July, Korean food, gongs and drums, and folk dances performed by women on the night of the full moon—this is one event I can’t pass up!

Costumes, particularly masks, are the most important part of the week’s first festival, which was staged in Fukui City. Featuring grotesque masks and comical dancing, the festival is an intangible folk and cultural treasure. The performers wear masks with different expressions, beat on taiko drums, and dance in choreographed movements that match the mask they’re wearing. The event is called the Baka Bayashi, derived from words meaning dummy and musical accompaniment, respectively. The spring festival reportedly dates from the Edo period, and every year 37 of the original masks are used.
Each of the performers dances and carries on in a different way to please the crowd; one exhibits exaggerated feminine behavior, another is comical, while a third is frightening.

The Hatagashira Festival also was held recently in Nakagusu, Okinawa. A hatagashira is a standard, in the sense of a flag. The village’s hatagashira was destroyed by fire during the battle on Okinawa in WWII 60 years ago, and they finally got a new one this year. Before the war, the standard was carried throughout the village on festival day as a request for a good harvest. The people of the village missed their old flag and talked about getting a new one every time they got together for an event. Finally, approval was granted to pay for the new standard using the proceeds from the national lottery.
This year, young people carried the standard throughout the village, accompanied by the sound of beating drums and gongs and about 200 spectators. There was also a tug-of-war contest, a frequent part of Japanese festivals. The ancient belief is that the winning team, usually representing a specific district, has been favored by the divinities and will have good fortune or a good harvest that year.

Meanwhile, Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, has a goofy little spring festival every year at this time. The participants hold large fans in both hands and use the fans to hit bystanders over the head. The fans themselves are designed to look like the faces of old people. The bystanders don’t mind getting whacked—it is a sign that they will receive the blessings of the divinities. The event has 300 years of tradition behind it, and is conducted over two nights both in the spring and in the fall.

And I can’t wrap this up unless I mention that another national chin-dong festival was held in Ichinose, Aichi Prefecture about 10 days ago. The chin-dong bands put on a great show, dressed in their usual assortment of weird clothes and makeup and playing inspired, zany music. They also performed their primary function—drumming up customers—as large crowds turned out to see them in the city’s shopping district. This year’s festival was the 39th. It was organized by local merchants hoping to kickstart a slumping local economy and has continued ever since. A total of 60 musicians in 20 bands from all parts of Japan, including Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyushu, participated in this year’s contest on stage after the parade.

All the news on the festival front this week is from Kyoto, and the first event was one of the most well known–the Aoi Festival, one of the three major festivals in the city. Officially called the Kamo Festival after the two Kamo shrines, it dates from the 6th century when there were a series of poor harvests in the area. The emperor sent an emissary to pray for a bountiful harvest. Later, imperial princesses substituted for the emperor, and today the festival is a recreation of the procession of those princesses to the two shrines.

The procession departs from the Kyoto Imperial Palace at 10:30 a.m. with a total of 511 participants and 40 oxen. The participants are dressed like nobles of the late Heian Period (794-1185). The festival gets its name from the aoi, or wild ginger, decordating the headgear of the marchers, the oxcarts, and houses along the procession route.

They proceed across the Aoi Bridge to the Shimo-Gamo shrine, where they conduct a Shinto ceremony. When this is completed, they proceed to the Kami-Gamo shrine to conduct a similar ceremony. The festival is held on the 15th every year and always attracts large numbers of sightseers. This year, the 15th fell on a Sunday, so a larger than normal crowd of onlookers lined the streets.

While the Aoi Festival has been held continuously for more than 14 centuries, this year marked the first time in 45 years that an event for children was conducted in another series of festivals (also sometimes referred to as the Aoi Festival in the district) held at two different Shinto shrines. The first in the series of events is the Oide, a procession of mikoshi, or portable shrines, from one of the Shinto shrines, held on April 24. These are stored in a subsidiary shrine until another procession is held on May 15th to return them.

The recreated event for children is a 500-meter march to the subsidiary shrine on the night of the 13th to see the mikoshi. Along the way, they parade through the town sounding metal rings called kan. As they walk, they jump on one foot, chanting, “Ara, inyoiyoi,” in time with the sound of the rings. As one of the boys put it, “The rings are heavy, but it was a lot of fun. I’d like to do it again.”

Finally, the last Kyoto event was not a festival itself, but the start of practice for a distinctive festival ceremony that will be conducted outside Kyoto for the first time this October. The ceremony is the Hokozashi, in which hoko, eight-meter long halberds weighing roughly 40 kilometers, are carried vertically by men who walk in a distinctive gait, shaking the halberds as they go and ringing bells attached to the tips.

There are only 142 of these special halberds remaining in Kyoto, and the shrine conducting this festival has 18 of them. Five will be used in the October ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a shrine foundation in Nagoya. The five people participating get together about 10 times a month for a two-hour practice session.

We’ve reported before on Ise Shrine, one of the most important Shinto shrines in Japan, and its tradition of tearing down and reconstructing its main buildings every 20 years. Naturally, there are festivals held in conjunction with this activity, and of course these festivals are also conducted once every 20 years. The shrine, in Ise, Mie Prefecture, held the first one this week to pray for the safe conduct of the work for cutting and transporting the wood used in the reconstruction.

A group of roughly 60 people, including the shrine priests and the workmen involved in the project, wore priestly vestments in a procession to the main shrine. At the conclusion of a ceremony there, the procession moved on to the festival site holding aloft special Shinto paper offerings in blue, yellow, red, white, and black (photo). There, a young boy with a sickle performed a ritual by cutting down the grass in the area.

The shrine was first rebuilt in the year 690, and this will be the 62nd reconstruction. Eight years remain until the new building is used, and in that time more than 30 festivals and ceremonies will be held. Another ceremony held the night of the procession is considered the holiest of all the related functions. During that ceremony, the workmen cut the wood that will be used for the main supports holding up the shrine floor. Mark Shinto as another religion that exalts carpenters!

As a dedicated tea drinker and big fan of country girls, here’s a festival I wish I could have attended. Held in Kyoto, the event involves a procession of young women who handled and picked the ceremonial tea carrying large jugs filled with the fresh tea leaves. Held on the evening of the 88th day after the start of spring (counting by the old calendar), it originated during the Edo period as a ceremony for presenting the new tea as an offering to the shogun’s household. It was conducted continuously from 1627 to 1867, and then resumed in 1973. This year was the 33rd procession since its resumption.

The parade numbers about 80 people. It starts at noon at a local Buddhist temple, proceeds through the Gion area, and ends at a Shinto shrine. There are no longer any shoguns to receive the 60 kilograms of tea, so it is donated instead to social welfare facilities in the Kyoto area.

What could be better than one festival featuring young women in period costumes? Two festivals featuring young women in period costumes! The second was held this week in Arita, Saga Prefecture, in conjunction with their annual ceramics and porcelain fair during the Golden Week holidays that just ended. (April 29 and May 3, 4, and 5 are national holidays in Japan.) More than a million people from throughout Japan and overseas converged on the small town to buy ceramics products.

This festival is specifically held to honor the memory of Li Sampyung, the Korean ceramist who was responsible for creating the modern Japanese ceramics industry 400 years ago when he discovered kaolin deposits in the area that enabled him to make the kind of ceramics in Japan that he had made in Korea. Li’s spirit has been made a tutelary deity of a local shrine.

The photograph shows miko, or Japanese shrine maidens (roughly equivalent to altar boys in a Catholic church) performing a kagura dance, which is a common feature of Shinto festivals. The prefectural police band also plays a few tunes. The ceremony is attended by representatives from all the major ceramics houses in Arita, the prefectural governor, prominent business people, and a large group of invited guests from South Korea. Everyone toasts the Koreans and thanks them for providing the people of Arita with the opportunity to get gloriously rich!

Most Japanese festivals are celebrations of local customs or events, but some feature performances from different areas based on a single theme. One of the latter festivals is the Hana Haru Fesu (Flower Spring Festival) held in Tokushima City last week. The theme was dancing, and the big crowd pleaser in Tokushima this year was an Okinawan dance and drum troupe with 50 members (photo).

I’ve seen performances by similar groups and can testify that it’s an unforgettable experience. Dynamic drumming and dancing by a group in colorful costumes, and chanting Seiya! at the top of their lungs while adding the distinctive Okinawan whistling would be difficult to forget even in the unlikely event you wanted to. The report out of Tokushima is that the Okinawans were the hit of the show, as the audience encouraged them with shouts and danced along with the troupe.

Their performance was part of the festival’s World Dance Carnival. In addition to the Okinawans, the folks in Tokushima were treated to dancing by groups from Hawaii, Cuba, and South Korea.

While people from around the world were dancing on a stage in a Tokushima park last week, they were dancing on tile roofs in tiger costumes in Kami-machi, Miyagi Prefecture. This performance, known as toramai (tiger dance) is part of a tradition that dates back about 650 years and is conducted as a prayer for protection against fire. The festival is based on the fable that clouds obey the dragon and the wind obeys the tiger, and in this area known for strong winds, they need all the help they can get to keep a blaze from spreading. The festival started off bright and early at 7:00 a.m. with fireworks and children pulling wheeled floats into town. The kids, dressed as tigers, then went to each house asking each family to be careful with fire in the household. The roof dancing, shown in the photo, came later in the day.

Karate, judo, kendo, and other Japanese martial arts have become so well known around the world that they have developed large groups of local devotees. One of the lesser-known martial arts, however, is yabusame, in which archers on horseback shoot arrows at targets. The equipment and time required—including resting the horses and picking up the arrows—may be why many Japanese don’t participate in it, much less people from overseas.

Fortunately, there are still enough practitioners to perform at festivals, and a yabusame festival was held this week in Fujikawaguchiko-machi, Yamanashi Prefecture. Known as the Kai no Katsuyama Yabusame Festival, it originated from Minamoto no Yoshimitsu’s offering to a local shrine for his victory in the Later Three Years’ War from 1083 to 1087. It is called the Three Years’ War despite the dates because there were only three years of actual fighting, and yes, there was an Earlier Nine Years’ War.

Those archers in horseback gallop for about 150 meters and fire their arrows at two targets: a 45-centimeter rectangular board and a 15-centimeter earthenware vessel. I’ll wager that last one isn’t easy to hit even when the archers are standing still. The folks in Yamanashi had to recruit six archers from a group in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, skillful enough to put on a convincing performance.

Long time friends of Japundit know the Japanese love festivals whose primary purpose is consuming liquor, but the Dorome Festival in the fishing community of Akaoka-cho, Kochi Prefecture, is eye-opening even by Japanese standards—the main event is a chug-a-lug contest for both men and women. As you can see from the photo, they use oversized sake cups—those for the men hold 1.8 liters of hooch, while those for the women contain a more demure 0.9 liters. The idea is to see who can guzzle it the fastest, and the master of ceremonies and the audience encourage them with shouts of “Drink every last drop!” and “You can down another one!” I’m sure there were also plenty of people shouting Ikki! Ikki!, which is what some fools scream at drinking parties when they want you to finish in one gulp. The festival records are 12.5 seconds for men and 10.8 seconds for women.

The festival’s name is derived from the local term for sardine fingerlings, and everyone in attendance enjoyed a beach party with dorome cuisine washed down by local sake, albeit at a slower pace. Other events included a Dorome Dance by the kids, a fishing boat parade, and a chin-don performance. Hey! Chin-don bands, food and drink on the beach, and women who can knock back a liter of sake in 10 seconds—I know where I’m going to be this time next year!