OMIZUTORI
This sin cleansing festival in Nara was our thrilling introduction to Japan’s cultural celebrations. The dramatic and precarious use of fire in a highly-flammable wooden temple that is over 1200 years old drew in an excitable crowd, who ooh’d and aah’d with great gusto as eleven blazing torches showered onlookers with embers. After squeezing in to a coveted front row position we were flecked with sparks granting us protection from evil for the rest of the year.
HAKATA GION YAMAKASA
This early morning extravaganza native to Fukuoka saw intricately decorated, one tonne floats being carted by troupes of thirty men through the streets of the city. The participants’ dress code meant we got an eyeful of bottoms every time a group stampeded past, which was possibly a little too much flesh for 5am. To add an extra element of crowd participation, the public splashed gallons of water over the thong wearing warriors as they raced along, which we are sure made pushing the one tonne behemoths much easier …
HOUNENSAI
On the remote island of Iriomote July’s harvest festival beckons an array of brilliant and baffling celebrations, such as tannoys that play sanshin music at 8am to wake the entire village every morning. Spanning over a week it begins, as all good festivals should, with three hours of heavy drinking and dancing in the local temple and where as guests we were able to do nothing but comply! This drinking session was followed by a low-key street procession that stopped every hundred feet for a sanshin solo.
Despite being attended by around only eighty people the energy given to the celebration was equal to a mob of thousands. The final night of the festival involves a village-wide game of tug of war, reckless fire use around a bed of dried straw and human supported podiums portraying curious traditional scenes. This was all conveniently located right outside the front door to our guest house. Sanshin solos (yet again) were plentiful as local children wreaked havoc with the decorations and the crowd sang, chanted and drank long in to the night.
