Fire and Violence! Oh my.
My supervisor is seriously the best person in the world! Despite my washing machine not actually being broken, she has managed to convince the school to get me a new one. Possibly by implying that she will kill me if she has to listen to me bitch about it again. "What's more expensive? Paying for a new ALT or for a new washing machine?" Either way, this weekend will be my last weekend of stupid 20-step laundry. My joy is immeasurable.
Said joy is only tainted by one thing, which is that I have my driving test coming up next week and everytime I think about it I feel ill. It seems like there are so many tiny things to remember...
But let's not think about that, instead let's talk about...
Abare Matsuri is also known as the Fire and Violence festival, which are two concepts that I, at least, can really get behind. Friday night is mostly about fire and Saturday night is mostly violence, though there is some fire involved, too. According to our resident expert (Eliza), Abare started hundreds of years ago during an epidemic. In order to combat the epidemic, some priests decided to try to channel the evil epidemic spirits into some mikoshi that would then be destroyed. Apparently it worked, because they still do it every year.
I got to Ushitsu (which is where the festival was) on Friday night just as the fireworks were about to begin. There, I met up with several other ALTs, and we talked for a bit. The fireworks were all right, not particularly impressive. Really, I've seen better. Actually, I got bored in the middle and went to find some takoyaki to eat. It was delicious!
On the subject of takoyaki, there was a lovely selection of food booths there. Not as many as there were during Hyakumangoku and Dekayama, but then the cities that both of those festivals took place in were much larger than Ushitsu - which is one of the smaller towns in Noto. Anyway, there were many lovely things to eat, and I was especially glad to see the tiny taiyaki (fish-shaped pastry filled with a wide variety of...fill...ings) that I had first found at Dekayama. Man, those things are delicious. Especially the chocolate ones.
Anyway, not much happened that night. Mostly the kirikos got carried around to various places and several bonfires were lit on the waterfront. The bonfires were basically large piles of kindling on top of sticks that would periodically fall off of the sticks and nearly kill people in the vicinity. Fun times! I spent most of the night just wandering around with Eliza, and playing "spot the shirtless hot guy while not looking too closely at the shirtless non-hot guys" This is a fun, but dangerous game, due to the danger of acute mental trauma if you happen to direct your attention toward the wrong place. You also have to play it with a certain amount of subtlety and distance, which means that you do not walk around telling people that you just saw the hottest shirtless guy ever for hours after the fact. Seriously, this is only useful if a. the guy is still around or b. you got a picture of him - otherwise, no one cares.
At one point in the night, we got pulled in to carry a kiriko around. Now, if you look closely at various pictures that I have taken of kirikos and their carrying (and there will shortly be more, as I managed to remember to bring my camera on Saturday - though not Friday. Actually, I remembered my camera BOTH nights, I just forgot to put in a memory card Friday.), you will not that there is ONE THING that the kiriko carriers have in common: PILLOWS. The shoulder pillow is EXTREMELY important if you do not want your shoulder to hurt like a mother for the next three days after only 10 minutes or so of kiriko-carrying. I know this, because we did not HAVE any pillows and were cursing their lack all through the rest of the night. Ouch, pain.
There were, of course, a ton of students wandering around. Most of them were the Notocho ALTs' kids, but a fair amount of them were from Anamizu! Of course, most of the high school students just ignored me (teenagers.) but I did get my fair share of "oh, Ewa! Goo-do Mo-ningu!" which, I think, is an excellent demonstration of my abilities as an English teacher. Even the first year terrorists came. Well, that's actually not particularly surprising, they strike me as the type that likes to play. But they did say hello, which was nice. Some of them even groped Eliza - although I maintain that they didn't do it on purpose the first time.
Eliza and I also purchased matsuri masks, which is the secret to instant love or at least constant amusement from all Japanese people. I mean it, a foreigner wearing an Anpanman/Doraemon mask is endlessly funny. It is even better if you can 1. identify the character you are wearing and 2. sing the theme song from the show.
Oh yeah, one last thing. The only place to get (alcoholic, non-vending machine) drinks in the entire festival was from a little stand that was set up in the doorway of a corner store. The corner store was fairly obviously owned by a family, with the stand being manned by various family members. This resulted in me purchasing alcoholic beverages from a five-year-old all Friday night. For some reason, this disturbed me. I can't think why.
Eventually (around 1am) the festival ended and we went home. I spent the night at Eliza's, which was very nice of her.
The next afternoon I met up with a bunch of KZ peeps who had come up to get their festival on and to celebrate lilannan's birthday. I took them to Mizuho for some delicious gelato. (now featuring salt and beer flavors! and edamame. The beer and edamame are ok, but the salt is DELICIOUS. AND it is genuine Suzu salt, which makes it double the exciting. The Italian chocolate is also good. so are the ginger and melon. Oh, it's all yummy)
After that, we went to the festival proper. We got there fairly early, so the kirikos were all standing in a line waiting to move, which was quite aesthetically pleasing. We wandered around for a bit, meeting what was probably every single foreigner in Ishikawa. This actually led me to flee the group at one point, which is what helped to give me a front row seat for the highlight of the entire festival: the systematic destruction of mikoshis made especially for this festival. Basically, a group of men, wearing what appears to be some sort of diaper + bandage ensemble and who basically start out drunk and get drunker as the night progress, carry the kiriko from the starting place by Some Temple to the ending point at Some Other Temple where it is tossed into a fire. Along the way, they make periodic stops in order to slam the kiriko into the ground and beat it with sticks. They also, for some reason, alternate dousing it with water and sake. Probably for purification purposes.
They also stop to pray (read: drink ceremonial sake) at various locations. The best such stop was at a bookstore, in which several people were calmly sitting and reading. Despite the commotion, the people continued to read and in fact FAILED TO EVEN LOOK UP all throughout the chanting/purification.
They also stopped for a bathroom break at one point, which me and Michelle, who is an Israeli graduate student at the university of Kanazawa and whom I spent a large portion of the night following the mikoshi with, though was hilarious.
The stops that were dedicated to tossing the mikoshi around were pretty intense. We found ourselves running away from an oncoming mikoshi a few times when we pressed forward a bit too far.
I've got several nifty movies of this, but I am not sure how I will make them available to you guys.
During this time, the kirikos had also started to move, so following the mikoshi was pretty hard and in general there was a lot of confusion.
Along the road to the temple, the mikoshi was also thrown into a handy river for a while. I can't tell you much about what happened there, because we got there too late to be able to get a good spot. I think I managed to get a few decent shots by holding my camera over my head.
After a few minutes of standing around trying to get a peek through the people, Michelle and I decided to get a head start to the next stopping point. This turned out be yet another river with a handy bonfire stick stood up next to it. Once the mikoshi showed up, the bonfire stick was lit and the carriers got to whack it (the mikoshi) against the river walls while being showered in sparks - which were provided by people poking the bonfire stick with smaller sticks. Not the most fun job to have but 1. it looked pretty damn impressive from the outside and 2. they were apparently too drunk to feel anything anymore because screams of horrible burny pain failed to materialize.
I had an excellent front row seat for all of this right next to the bonfire, which was not as clever a plan as it seemed when I thought of it, because I ended up being showered in sparks, too. Not to mention, fire is hot. Sometimes I forget that. I was probably lucky my hair didn't catch fire - I am told by Eliza that this is a very real danger. (she also mentioned that people have died during this festival, which I can definitely believe. Japan is awesome, because all this stuff is completely true, but there are STILL a ton of small children running around the festival freely)
Anyway, the burniness continued until they completely ran out of bonfire stick to poke, at which the guys carrying the mikoshi got a break. At this point, incidentally, most of my Kanazawa crew had been assimilated into a kiriko and were carrying that around. I would have stayed around to kibitz them, but alas there was one more stage in the mikoshi carrying to be accomplished. I went off to the temple a bit earlier, and managed to get a good vantage point for the part where they tossed it into the (unimpressive) bonfire. So yeah, I only had a few minutes to wait before the mikoshi carriers brought up the mikoshi and danced around the fire before flinging it in. Of course, the two dunkings into the fire hadn't exactly improved the mikoshi's flammability so they had to kind of keep flinging it in and rolling it around - I am really amazed that no one fell on fire. Actually, that's a lie, one person did fall in and I personally witnessed him run out of the circle and over to a handy bucket full of water to douse himself. There were probably others, but I stopped paying attention at that point.
After about 10 minutes of this, they took the mikoshi up to the temple to be chopped up, and I went off in search of my KZ peeps. They had managed to carry the kiriko to the end of its route and were having a rest and an onigiri. We (very briefly) debated staying for the second mikoshi (since they were going to do it ALL AGAIN - it was about 1am at that point, by the way) but quickly decided to get on with plans for the night, which had involved finding a beach and setting off fireworks.
This ended in FAILURE. Largely due to differences in opinions regarding what actually constitutes a "beach". Basically, one person pointed us to a close by "beach" that failed to live up to our standards. They were quite stringent standards in that they required a beach that was A. non-smelly and B. not littered with what appeared to be broken husks of small boats. Unfortunately, the closest beach that would probably have met this standards was maybe forty minutes away in Suzu - so it was decided that we would just go back to my place and sleep. Now, I have it on good authority that my predecessor at one point had something like 10 friends staying there on a visit, but this was by far the most people I'VE ever had. Thank goodness for that one episode earlier this year where my landlord randomly decided to give me a bunch of extra futons and blankets.
And that, my friends, was the end of Abare. Sunday was spent cleaning the house and shopping.
I'm going to try to get the pictures up today, so look for those, too.
On an unrelated note, I just read in an e-mail from a friend of the family that where they are (Argentina) they can get more than a pound of any fruit for the equivalent of one US dollar. For contrast, let me tell you that I bought a thing of plums (maybe about a pound) for 400 yen last weekend and was very pleased to get them at such a low price.
edit: forgot to mention that I'll be walking in the Hasebe festival parade in my town tomorrow. Dressed as a "female warrior" whatever that means. It'll probably be uncomfortable, but the upside is that my entire town is (quite a bit) smaller than the distance that the hyakumangoku parade traversed, so hopefully I will not be as ded as the other people afterwards.
edit 2: abare photos are now up, my camera is not very useful in the dark, but I did my best. For some good photos of the festival, check Michelle's Facebook Page as her camera appears to be better than mine.
Said joy is only tainted by one thing, which is that I have my driving test coming up next week and everytime I think about it I feel ill. It seems like there are so many tiny things to remember...
But let's not think about that, instead let's talk about...
Abare Matsuri is also known as the Fire and Violence festival, which are two concepts that I, at least, can really get behind. Friday night is mostly about fire and Saturday night is mostly violence, though there is some fire involved, too. According to our resident expert (Eliza), Abare started hundreds of years ago during an epidemic. In order to combat the epidemic, some priests decided to try to channel the evil epidemic spirits into some mikoshi that would then be destroyed. Apparently it worked, because they still do it every year.
I got to Ushitsu (which is where the festival was) on Friday night just as the fireworks were about to begin. There, I met up with several other ALTs, and we talked for a bit. The fireworks were all right, not particularly impressive. Really, I've seen better. Actually, I got bored in the middle and went to find some takoyaki to eat. It was delicious!
On the subject of takoyaki, there was a lovely selection of food booths there. Not as many as there were during Hyakumangoku and Dekayama, but then the cities that both of those festivals took place in were much larger than Ushitsu - which is one of the smaller towns in Noto. Anyway, there were many lovely things to eat, and I was especially glad to see the tiny taiyaki (fish-shaped pastry filled with a wide variety of...fill...ings) that I had first found at Dekayama. Man, those things are delicious. Especially the chocolate ones.
Anyway, not much happened that night. Mostly the kirikos got carried around to various places and several bonfires were lit on the waterfront. The bonfires were basically large piles of kindling on top of sticks that would periodically fall off of the sticks and nearly kill people in the vicinity. Fun times! I spent most of the night just wandering around with Eliza, and playing "spot the shirtless hot guy while not looking too closely at the shirtless non-hot guys" This is a fun, but dangerous game, due to the danger of acute mental trauma if you happen to direct your attention toward the wrong place. You also have to play it with a certain amount of subtlety and distance, which means that you do not walk around telling people that you just saw the hottest shirtless guy ever for hours after the fact. Seriously, this is only useful if a. the guy is still around or b. you got a picture of him - otherwise, no one cares.
At one point in the night, we got pulled in to carry a kiriko around. Now, if you look closely at various pictures that I have taken of kirikos and their carrying (and there will shortly be more, as I managed to remember to bring my camera on Saturday - though not Friday. Actually, I remembered my camera BOTH nights, I just forgot to put in a memory card Friday.), you will not that there is ONE THING that the kiriko carriers have in common: PILLOWS. The shoulder pillow is EXTREMELY important if you do not want your shoulder to hurt like a mother for the next three days after only 10 minutes or so of kiriko-carrying. I know this, because we did not HAVE any pillows and were cursing their lack all through the rest of the night. Ouch, pain.
There were, of course, a ton of students wandering around. Most of them were the Notocho ALTs' kids, but a fair amount of them were from Anamizu! Of course, most of the high school students just ignored me (teenagers.) but I did get my fair share of "oh, Ewa! Goo-do Mo-ningu!" which, I think, is an excellent demonstration of my abilities as an English teacher. Even the first year terrorists came. Well, that's actually not particularly surprising, they strike me as the type that likes to play. But they did say hello, which was nice. Some of them even groped Eliza - although I maintain that they didn't do it on purpose the first time.
Eliza and I also purchased matsuri masks, which is the secret to instant love or at least constant amusement from all Japanese people. I mean it, a foreigner wearing an Anpanman/Doraemon mask is endlessly funny. It is even better if you can 1. identify the character you are wearing and 2. sing the theme song from the show.
Oh yeah, one last thing. The only place to get (alcoholic, non-vending machine) drinks in the entire festival was from a little stand that was set up in the doorway of a corner store. The corner store was fairly obviously owned by a family, with the stand being manned by various family members. This resulted in me purchasing alcoholic beverages from a five-year-old all Friday night. For some reason, this disturbed me. I can't think why.
Eventually (around 1am) the festival ended and we went home. I spent the night at Eliza's, which was very nice of her.
The next afternoon I met up with a bunch of KZ peeps who had come up to get their festival on and to celebrate lilannan's birthday. I took them to Mizuho for some delicious gelato. (now featuring salt and beer flavors! and edamame. The beer and edamame are ok, but the salt is DELICIOUS. AND it is genuine Suzu salt, which makes it double the exciting. The Italian chocolate is also good. so are the ginger and melon. Oh, it's all yummy)
After that, we went to the festival proper. We got there fairly early, so the kirikos were all standing in a line waiting to move, which was quite aesthetically pleasing. We wandered around for a bit, meeting what was probably every single foreigner in Ishikawa. This actually led me to flee the group at one point, which is what helped to give me a front row seat for the highlight of the entire festival: the systematic destruction of mikoshis made especially for this festival. Basically, a group of men, wearing what appears to be some sort of diaper + bandage ensemble and who basically start out drunk and get drunker as the night progress, carry the kiriko from the starting place by Some Temple to the ending point at Some Other Temple where it is tossed into a fire. Along the way, they make periodic stops in order to slam the kiriko into the ground and beat it with sticks. They also, for some reason, alternate dousing it with water and sake. Probably for purification purposes.
They also stop to pray (read: drink ceremonial sake) at various locations. The best such stop was at a bookstore, in which several people were calmly sitting and reading. Despite the commotion, the people continued to read and in fact FAILED TO EVEN LOOK UP all throughout the chanting/purification.
They also stopped for a bathroom break at one point, which me and Michelle, who is an Israeli graduate student at the university of Kanazawa and whom I spent a large portion of the night following the mikoshi with, though was hilarious.
The stops that were dedicated to tossing the mikoshi around were pretty intense. We found ourselves running away from an oncoming mikoshi a few times when we pressed forward a bit too far.
I've got several nifty movies of this, but I am not sure how I will make them available to you guys.
During this time, the kirikos had also started to move, so following the mikoshi was pretty hard and in general there was a lot of confusion.
Along the road to the temple, the mikoshi was also thrown into a handy river for a while. I can't tell you much about what happened there, because we got there too late to be able to get a good spot. I think I managed to get a few decent shots by holding my camera over my head.
After a few minutes of standing around trying to get a peek through the people, Michelle and I decided to get a head start to the next stopping point. This turned out be yet another river with a handy bonfire stick stood up next to it. Once the mikoshi showed up, the bonfire stick was lit and the carriers got to whack it (the mikoshi) against the river walls while being showered in sparks - which were provided by people poking the bonfire stick with smaller sticks. Not the most fun job to have but 1. it looked pretty damn impressive from the outside and 2. they were apparently too drunk to feel anything anymore because screams of horrible burny pain failed to materialize.
I had an excellent front row seat for all of this right next to the bonfire, which was not as clever a plan as it seemed when I thought of it, because I ended up being showered in sparks, too. Not to mention, fire is hot. Sometimes I forget that. I was probably lucky my hair didn't catch fire - I am told by Eliza that this is a very real danger. (she also mentioned that people have died during this festival, which I can definitely believe. Japan is awesome, because all this stuff is completely true, but there are STILL a ton of small children running around the festival freely)
Anyway, the burniness continued until they completely ran out of bonfire stick to poke, at which the guys carrying the mikoshi got a break. At this point, incidentally, most of my Kanazawa crew had been assimilated into a kiriko and were carrying that around. I would have stayed around to kibitz them, but alas there was one more stage in the mikoshi carrying to be accomplished. I went off to the temple a bit earlier, and managed to get a good vantage point for the part where they tossed it into the (unimpressive) bonfire. So yeah, I only had a few minutes to wait before the mikoshi carriers brought up the mikoshi and danced around the fire before flinging it in. Of course, the two dunkings into the fire hadn't exactly improved the mikoshi's flammability so they had to kind of keep flinging it in and rolling it around - I am really amazed that no one fell on fire. Actually, that's a lie, one person did fall in and I personally witnessed him run out of the circle and over to a handy bucket full of water to douse himself. There were probably others, but I stopped paying attention at that point.
After about 10 minutes of this, they took the mikoshi up to the temple to be chopped up, and I went off in search of my KZ peeps. They had managed to carry the kiriko to the end of its route and were having a rest and an onigiri. We (very briefly) debated staying for the second mikoshi (since they were going to do it ALL AGAIN - it was about 1am at that point, by the way) but quickly decided to get on with plans for the night, which had involved finding a beach and setting off fireworks.
This ended in FAILURE. Largely due to differences in opinions regarding what actually constitutes a "beach". Basically, one person pointed us to a close by "beach" that failed to live up to our standards. They were quite stringent standards in that they required a beach that was A. non-smelly and B. not littered with what appeared to be broken husks of small boats. Unfortunately, the closest beach that would probably have met this standards was maybe forty minutes away in Suzu - so it was decided that we would just go back to my place and sleep. Now, I have it on good authority that my predecessor at one point had something like 10 friends staying there on a visit, but this was by far the most people I'VE ever had. Thank goodness for that one episode earlier this year where my landlord randomly decided to give me a bunch of extra futons and blankets.
And that, my friends, was the end of Abare. Sunday was spent cleaning the house and shopping.
I'm going to try to get the pictures up today, so look for those, too.
On an unrelated note, I just read in an e-mail from a friend of the family that where they are (Argentina) they can get more than a pound of any fruit for the equivalent of one US dollar. For contrast, let me tell you that I bought a thing of plums (maybe about a pound) for 400 yen last weekend and was very pleased to get them at such a low price.
edit: forgot to mention that I'll be walking in the Hasebe festival parade in my town tomorrow. Dressed as a "female warrior" whatever that means. It'll probably be uncomfortable, but the upside is that my entire town is (quite a bit) smaller than the distance that the hyakumangoku parade traversed, so hopefully I will not be as ded as the other people afterwards.
edit 2: abare photos are now up, my camera is not very useful in the dark, but I did my best. For some good photos of the festival, check Michelle's Facebook Page as her camera appears to be better than mine.