Running Around in Circles in Your Underpants

April 19th is a day of infamy in our part of rural Japan. It is the day of the Furakawa festival, the spring festival of the town two train stops north of Takayama. On this day all the Sake breweries, which have been owned for generations, are opened to whoever may chance to wander in. The wives, daughters, grandmothers and any female old enough to hold a spoon have spent weeks preparing exquisite foods to present to the guests of their empires. One of my students is a young and beautiful Sake princess (for these breweries truly are kingdoms). She invited me to come to her tatami palace before the festivities began. The food was beautiful but to my vegetarian and western palate, anathema. Unfortunately, Daniel was not there to play decoy for my silent gagging. He worked late in another town and planned to meet us, but called and said his train had hit a deer and he could not make it.

A low and distant thudding began to draw the guests into the crowded streets where men in samurai boots and well… their underwear began to congregate for the main events. They started the celebrations by chanting and then running around the around a massive taiko drum onto which, after numerous revolutions, two men climbed to a height of nearly twenty feet. These men were bound back to back with a large sash of white cloth, to match their underwear of course, handed their drum sticks and began pounding. Their drunken comrades then lifted them while other jumped on a lower platform chanting and rocking the whole apparatus through the strength of their legs, and thus they began their journey. Upon their departure numerous other groups began to tear through the crowed streets with battering rams of approximately twelve feet to clear the crowds. These telephone poles have swathes of cotton wrapped around them to soften to blow if a head were to come in contact with its end, but also so that it may be set on end and its drunk carriers prove their worth by balancing on their stomachs as their peers alternately hold the base and spray them with sake from their mouths. These scantily clad men reportedly drink sake incessantly before and during the festival. My tour guide (another of my students) refused to tell me what they were saying in the chants and put me on the first train before things “got too exciting.” I suppose Japanese propriety reigns in the end even during the barbarism of the Furakawa festival.

Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring

This weekend our city was flooded with people coming to see Takayama's spring festival. It is reportedly the third largest festival in Japan with the main attractions being the puppet shows and the parade floats. The parades happen on large and small scales all day and night all over the city. Children and male residents of all ages dress in traditional costumes and process though the streets usually banging drums, playing flutes, and always clanging bells. The bells register first in the pit of your stomach and then in your head. They sound like a car crash and fingernails on a chalkboard combined. Their purpose is to wake the sleeping spirits entreat spring to come to Takayama. The larger parades often have dragon dancers, and a myriad of flag and lantern bearing guards to protect the floats. The floats, or rather shrines, are pulled and pushed awkwardly through the streets by men wearing straw sandals. Some have massive drums mounted on top with drummers perched beside them, others have musicians hidden in their bellies, and still others are the afore mentioned puppet shows. Our ever helpful students cumulatively delivered nine identical, carefully marked, brochures with streets, show times and various insider tips carefully copied out in English to make sure we didn't miss a second of the festivities.

Despite the festivities Mr. Potato faithfully came around at 7:00 am as he does every second Saturday. Usually you can hear him comings for about half an hour before his arrival and another half hour after her departs. He drives around the city at an ominously slow pace and has a three second looped recording with someone singing about the price of potatoes at the pitch of an air raid siren.

Other sounds common to our ears are the "Big Ben" chimes that do not chime the hours but rather go off at frequent, strange and inappropriate intervals, the "Go Home" music which plays at exactly 6:00 pm and is piped over the whole city reminding school children of their curfew, the loudspeakers that announce when there is a fire anywhere in the city, and the inexhaustible child who lives next door and who never seems to stop screaming.