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.