About 6 months ago Keiko first told me about the Hatasho Festival (matsuri in japanese). She told me about how each village (read neighborhood) would make their own float. She told me that the men and boys from each of the villages would carry the floats to the temple, glugging bottles of sake and singing loud chants. She promised great festival food, bad weather, and lots of drunken, far-under-aged Junior high school students. And boy did she deliver!
Today's festival was exactly as she'd said it would be. Every town decorated a huge float with fake sakura (cherry blossoms), and crepe paper that melted in the rain, and large manequins of traditional japanese paper wrapped in plastic or ponchos to protect them from the weather. The men and boys in charge of rolling/carrying the floats mostly wore traditional style outfits (yukata, or summer pajamas, and the rubber-soled shoes that separate at the big toe), donned color coded banners (keiko's town was neon green), and shared a very large bottle of sake. The floats were carried to the street outside the shrine where they took turns, each village one-at-a-time, carrying the floats back and forth and back and forth in front of the crowds, chanting and running and banging on taiko drums and the bells carried by the boys too small to lift the float. After the pointless 50m dashes had ended, the float was hoisted again, and carried into the shrine, where each village again danced around with their float, this time adding in spins (that frequently left the more inebriated men lying in the wet sand) and tossing blessings and money toward the shrine. Later kids scavenged around for the coins and bills that hadn't quite made it inside.
There was more chanting and turning and drinking and lifting of the floats. Then finally there was a break, during which a famous comedian and a not-so-famous country singer came in to entertain the masses while they put their heads down and powered through to the height of their drunkenness. It was time to meander around the temple, bumping into people i knew (mostly students) and tasting the wonders of japanese festival food: takoyaki, crepes filled with whipped cream and bananas, ringo ame (candied apples), and more. And there was also time for drinking. As the token foreigner at the small-town matsuri, i'd recieved the attention of many strangers, a few of whom were outgoing or inebriated enough to come, introduce themselves to me and share their sake.
Mi-chan and Keiko eating a "Mickey" candied apple
Now when i say 'share' i should point out that the favored method of sharing at the festival was to put your bottle up to the other persons and hold it for them for as long as you saw fit. Being both a foreigner and a woman, I subconciously encouraged the men to play a little game with me to see how much i could glug down (eyes roll). The 30-something very drunken strangers offering me their sake was one thing, and it wasn't too hard to pass on the fourth and fifth offers, but when a group of my students came up to me and dared me to drink, it was hard to say no. Sure, i was thinking about how wrong it was, about how i shouldn't join them, about how it would undermine my authority, how i couldn't support their drunkeness...and yet i abandoned all moral reason and drank sake with my 14- and 15- year old students.
Now i'm sure this sounds shocking and you're picturing some completely morely inept society where teenaged boys are not only allowed but encouraged to drink in public. And you'd be partly right. But you'd be missing the bigger picture here: the sense of community, the right-of-passage, the idea that all boys are becoming men, and that together they can protect and carry on the ideals of the village and family and community they now share. Which is a really sappy why of saying its not as bad as it seems.
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