Tomioka Fall Festival

note: this post is at least one month late

Tomioka had a festival. It was a big one, and the best time I have had in Tomioka in a long time. Festivals in Japan are a big deal. This one in particular was big deal because it only happens every other year. Everyone in the city participates. From kids to old people everyone dresses up and plays some part in the festivities. For weeks I have been hearing people practicing the Japanese flute and drums getting ready. After a month of being painfully out of tune, they were approaching pleasant sounds.
This is how the festival goes. Each tiny neighborhood in the city has a "team". They all wear matching outfits and form a festival band. Each neighborhood team has either a float or a moving Shinto shrine that they tend to during the festival. The floats are two story, big, moving carts. They have lanterns strung around them and tapestries on the main part. Children usually sit up front and beat the drums while some play the flute. All the floats play the same festival song. Everyone is dressed up in traditional costumes, though, every neighborhood has a different attire, and many have these alien looking headbands on. The top story of the float either has some people on the top swinging lanterns or a mannequin of a character or famous historical figure. The whole float is pulled by a team with two ropes. Some flute players or dancers jaunt around outside. So the whole thing goes slowly up and down the festival streets with its songs chortling and the kids and babies all excited and the adults happy from the copious amounts of free sake.
The moving Shinto shrines are a more serious matter. It looks like a tiny little house, but made of gold and wood, and purple rope. On the top of it is usually a gold bird- perhaps a phoenix, maybe or eagle.... I can't tell. The shrine is on a platform of three large beams. The shrine is ridiculously heavy.... about a billion pounds would be the exact measurement. A group of about thirty men hoist the shrine onto their shoulders and take it through the streets. They bounce as they go and chant a word as they do it. The shrine shakes and all the gold glitters. Its ridiculously hard work and there is a group of another 30 men to take the place of those carrying it when they get tired. The incredible burden is eased with lots of camaraderie and lots of openly distributed alcohol.
On saturday, when I first got to the festival, what I found were groups of kids lifting mini moving shinto shrines and doing the obligatory bobbing that goes along with it. Floats were being dragged around too. I saw many of my students all dressed up, playing their various festival parts. I walked around for a bit and then headed for the International Association tent on the grounds of the elementary school. As soon as I got there the Thai ladies gave me five plates of food, a beer, and a cup of chai tea. They had made everything themselves and it was very delicious. I hung around there with Trey and the other internationals. The Indonesian guys from the mount Fuji trip were there. I felt like shit for not ever inviting them to hang out after that. We walked around some more to look at the floats. Mr. Imai gave us some special festival shirts and bands to wear. We were very skeptical about this since it probably meant we were going to have to do something, though no one would tell us what. I saw a huge line of old ladies in kimonos dancing down the street chanting their festival chant. They were led by this incredible old guy who danced like a little sprite, shouted directions to the grandmas, and had a huge unfaltering smile on his face. He was gayer than the day is long and I am sure this was his one day to shine. Trey said his idol must have been Richard Simmons, but this Japanese guy was so much more.
I watched my adult student dance a lion dance. Apparently its very traditional and he takes it very seriously. There was someone dressed as monkey-god's messenger and three men dressed in lion's masks. The masks were decorated with feathers and didn't look much like how we picture lions. The lions and monkeys danced along to music, and the lions beat little drums strapped to their chests. It was an excellent performance. Ironically, it was followed by a troupe of kids and teenagers dressed in black sweatsuits dancing to "gangsta" American rap songs and attempting to "stomp". As if that weren't bizarre enough they were followed by a group of teenage girls in short short skirts dancing crazily to more inappropriate American music. Also in the space of these hours I met a crazy Bengladesh-ian (Bengal?) guy who was super friendly in an odd and annoying way. He kept insisting that we "go get some drinks" "go get some drinks" "go get some drinks". I kept shrugging it off or making excuses for a long time, but he wouldn't let it, or me alone, even though I had other foreigner friends to hang out with. At last he cornered me into it and because I am too nice I went along with it. "Drinks" turned out to be green slurpie-like things at the nearby department store. He talked to me about things, which I pretended to care about. He expressed his need to find a wife and get married. I told him that was nice and the stupid token expressions that you say in such stupid situations. He said his friend had an American wife and how shoe was sooo nice and now he wanted to find and American girlfriend, but he's not handsome so he can't. I told him that American girls are awful, selfish, horrid little brats.... not really, but I told him to keep looking. He asked me if I wanted more drinks and his method of asking was more like "Lets have more drinks! Come on. more drinks, don't you want some more, let's have more drinks, why don't you want more drinks" in less than 10 seconds. As if I wanted to to drink 10 glasses of frozen green slurpie slush. One never quite does it for me. I said hell no and made us leave. I bolted back to my more sane foreigner buddies and found refuge.
Then inexplicably, all the foreigners were herded into a 10 minute dance lesson. We were going to be dancing up and down the streets in a huge line of all the other dancing groups. Of course the dance made no sense and no one could understand it only ten minutes. It was pretty much hopeless from the start. We gave it a try though. When the time came, all of us dressed in our shirts and belts and super-tight headbands. We all stood in three lines behind another group of old ladies in kimonos who graciously tried to demonstrate the dance for us. We tried our best, but still didn't know what we were doing. No one was in sync. We were clinking our little sticks together hopelessly. The float teams on the sideline were trying to encourage us. Eventually we started to catch on after the 5th lap around the festival. I was so tired by the end.
After the dancing, the International Association disbanded. Mr. Imai took us to his van and gave us different shirt/jackets to wear. This could only mean more festivities awaited us. He took us to his neighborhood team station. Everyone was eating and drinking beer and sake. We were shown around and offered some beer. Mr. Imai mingled with his important Tomioka city such and such friends. Trey and I tried to mingle with the regular folks, but with less success. Suddenly everyone perked up and we knew it was time. Mikoshi time! Moving Shinto shrine time! The ridiculously heavy spirit house was about to be heaved, bobbed, and shimmied through Tomioka. The men all lined up along the three wood beams that held the shrine. There were lots of them. They picked it up from the saw horses it rested on, started chanting their chant, and bobbed along with it, but in the way one bobs when under the crushing weight of a highly sentimental object. Mr. Imai pushed Trey into the lineup of shrine carriers. The poor kid. Of course he is way taller than the other men, so a disproportionate amount of the weight was on his shoulder. After a week of telling me that shrine carrying is easy for women, Mr. Imai pushed me into the crowd of grunting/chanting men. He was somewhat right about the ease of shrine carrying. Though I am usually of comparable height to most Japanese people, I was much shorter than the men carrying the shrine. My shoulder didn't reach the support beam. Therefore I couldn't really help out with carrying any of the weight. I basically just held the beam and bobbed along with the rest of them. For a bit I tried to support as much weight as I could with my hand/wrist/arm, but I think it was more painful for me than it helped anyone else. The thing is so unbelievably heavy. After a bit Trey and I ducked out so actual contributing members of the team could do their job and we could give our nearly dislocated body parts a rest. Our efforts were rewarded with tiny beers and tiny styrofoam bowls full of sake. So were everyone else's once they finished a leg of the journey. The shrine stopped many times. The sawhorses were brought out and the shrine was rested in the middle of the street. Everyone drank and laughed together. We made friends with a guy from a float team parked right next to our shrine. We were talking to him when we witnessed a surreal slow motion crash.
There was an old man riding down the street on his three-wheeled mobility scooter. He was drunk out of his mind. Sidenote: public drunkenness/ drinking in public is totally socially permissible in Japan. Our mikoshi shrine is resting in the middle of the narrow street and a float is resting next to it. Lots of people were standing around enjoying themselves. The old guy just kept chugging along very slowly towards us. It was happening so slowly that no one paid much attention to it. Then all of a sudden he was right on top of us. Without slowing down or attempting to stop at all he came right up on a woman standing right next to us. He hit her at such a slow rate of speed that she didn't even think to react and get out of the way, and the front wheel of the scooter actually began to travel up her leg. She jumped out of the way and the front wheel of the scooter began to travel up the wall of paper signs she was standing in front of. The whole thing was happening at about 2 miles an hour. It seemed like slow motion. We were all looking on in amazement, but were strangely paralyzed. Continuing the slow motion disaster, the scooter kept riding up the wall at 2 mph and was tipping backwards. The old guy didn't let go for a second or seem particularly phased by the fact that he just hit a woman, his scooter was scaling a wall with him still on it, and the whole thing had just tipped over. The front wheel was in the air. The back of the scooter was on the ground. And the guy was now looking straight ahead at the sky instead of the road. He was still holding on to the handle bars, still seated in his capsized scooter. Some people tried to help him up and get his scooter working again, which took a bit of time. The old guy did not say a word. The whole thing was just so bizarre. Watching it in slow mo was a mixture of humor and shock. No one was really hurt, so we all stood around highly amused by what had just occurred. The old man's victim showed off the tire tread marks running up the leg of her white pants. She laughed about it.
On the way back to the shrine team's headquarters, while other people were carrying the shrine we made friends with some guys on the team. Shockingly they were actually our age, which is a rare thing in these parts. I talked to them for a long time and they were a lot of fun. Some spoke more english than others. So the conversation was largely a tag team effort. I hung out with them until it got late and I couldn't stave off exhaustion with beer anymore.
The next day Trey and I met my student Takahiro. He is one of my favorite students. He is our age and very cool. His hobby is taking care of his vegetable garden. He has traveled to every prefecture in Japan on two epic, lone motorcycle trips. He is very invested in learning English. In a very un-Japanese way he doesn't care about the business world or getting ahead in in some boring career. He works the night shift in a convenience store until April, when he will go to Canada for a year-long working holiday. He wants to work as a farm hand and hang out with Canadians.
Despite talking to him a lot after class, this was our first social outing. Trey, Takahiro, and I wandered around the festival. I ran into a lot of my students. First off we ate festival food. We had takoyaki (octopus inside tiny balls of batter-delicious), choco bananas, Yakimanju (a bread thing on a stick brushed with sweet, sticky soy sauce- its our regions specialty, but less than delicious), fried chicken bits, little cake things filled with cream or bright purple potato. Yum.
After eating and wandering for a bit, it was settled that we would go karaoke. People in Japan love karaoke. It was a little strange for me to go there in the middle of the afternoon, because I usually associate it with night time and drunkenness. But its very cheap during the day time and it did not strike Takahiro as strange. It was fun. Takahiro sang Japanese songs. Trey and i sang English songs. Takahiro gave his best attempt at some English songs. We sang Mr. Roboto in the spirit of reciprocity. Then things took a tragic turn. I had been fighting a cold and a sore throat all week. But it was festival weekend and I didn't want anything to slow me down. However, as I was singing my voice started to get a little rough... from the cold and all the alcohol consumption and staying up late. Then, my voice started cracking all over the place like a pubescent boy. My voice was strangely deep and scratchy and whispery. I could barely talk. i was a Karaoke casualty. It became even more of a problem later in the week, when I practically lost all of my voice and could barely teach my classes. Anyways, we ran into another one of my students and Takahiro's classmate. She was nice and drunk- happy and giddy. Then, despite my muteness, we went to dinner at a rotating sushi bar. I tried natto sushi for the first time. Natto is fermented beans that give off a really strong, foul odor. Having eaten (and liked them) is kind of a litmus test for foreigner for how assimilated you have become in Japanese culture. I have been asked at least 20 times if i have ever eaten natto. I didn't think the natto sushi was bad at all. I even liked it. Though later I bought some natto at the grocery store to eat at home and absolutely hated it. I don't know what this says about my relationship with Japan.