Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Obon? Bon!!!


My wife, daughter, and some other members of our enormous family + me visited a summer festival this week. It was held on the premises of a retirement home where one of our many cousins works. Such festivals are held all over Japan during the Obon period at temples, shrines, schools, community centers, or anywhere else with enough space to set up. Although there may be regional variations, I think the basic layout is pretty much the same no matter where you go. There will be a raised stage or platform in the middle where an announcer sits with a mic, playing canned music. Sometimes there will be actual musicians, or some combination of taped/live. Local residents "dance" around the stage. I use scare quotes here because it's not so much a dance as a procession. There are apparently traditional steps and arm movements, but nobody actually knows them. They just sort of imitate the person in front of them (who is imitating the person in front of them and so on), so it's kind of a self-organizing thing. Off to one side vendors set up tents selling yakisoba (sauce-drenched fried noodles), kakigori (shaved ice with syrup), yakitori (skewered, grilled chicken) and beer. There are also usually some games for the kids, such as popgun shooting galleries and "kingyo sukui," in which kids try to fish live goldfish out of an inflatable wading pool with a flimsy tissue net. Oddly that "sukui" bit means "rescue" or "save" and also shows up in the word "sukuinushi" meaning savior, i.e. Jesus. So whenever I see kids playing this game, it gives me a mental image of Christ bending down from heaven with a huge paper net, trying to fish out human souls before they soak through the tissue and fall back into Hell. Whoa...gotta lay off those morning glory seeds.

Everything was going pretty normally. We were all standing around outside the ring of dancers drinking beer (except for the kids and drivers), wolfing down noodles and chatting. The dancers were trotting around the stage with varying degrees of enthusiasm. A lot of them looked like they had been dragged from their beds at the retirement home, some literally being wheeled around by the staff. I honestly can't say if that was a kindness or a cruelty. Some of the old dears, like one very elderly wheelchair-bound woman who was compulsively chewing on her yukata collar, didn't actually appear to understand what was going on. I kind of wondered for whose benefit this was being done -for the retirees enjoyment, or to give a photo-op to their next of kin? However, this depressing thought was driven from my head by a sight that made me spray beer out of both nostrils. A pair of pale cheeks had ascended the stage and commenced jiggling up and down. They had a taiko drummer, wearing only a loincloth, headband and grin, get up and reel off a couple of numbers on the big drum. After all, this is the land of public, fully-nude, occasionally mixed bathing, but it was still kind of a jolt. Even after 10+ years of living here, I'm still sometimes reminded I'm not in Kansas. Kansass maybe, but not Kansas.