You can't go to Japan and not experience a festival. I don't mean that it's an experience that you must savour here (though it definitely is). I mean you
literally can't miss them. Festivals are everywhere in Japan, especially in the summer, and you'd have to put effort in to avoid them. Cities, towns, villages...even individual schools and shops have their own festivals.
They come in all shapes and sizes: my own local festival, the Namegawa Matsuri in November, is a small, pleasant little town festival that fits on the local running track, with the main (and admittedly only) feature being a small performance stage playing music throughout the day. On the other end of the scale are the massive festivals that draw onlookers from all over the country, that take over the entire city as huge teams of people parade dashi or mikoshi (festival floats) through the crowds. The festival I visited yesterday, the Kumagaya Uchiwa Matsuri, is of the latter kind, and is one of the biggest festivals in the Kanto region.
One of the big features of festivals are the stalls: they line the closed off streets with their colourful awnings and proclaim their superior wares to the passers-by. However, one of my biggest pet peeves is the lack of variety and samey-ness of these stalls: you could be forgiven for thinking you've gotten turned around and passed the same stall five times. At any given major festival, you're guaranteed to see the following stalls: takoyaki, okonomiyaki, choco-banana, karaage, yakisoba, ramen, a character mask stall and, oddest of all, live goldfish, where kids can scoop them out of the shallow tank and into plastic bags. These are repeated over and over again, and any original stalls few and far between. I often picture the owners of these stalls packing up and hustling off to the next festival on the circuit. There's nothing wrong with these per se (festival food is usually reasonably priced and always tasty), but I wish there were more interesting, localised stalls.
But the main event is always the floats: great colourful behemoths that are either pulled by ropes or shouldered by huge teams of alcohol-fortified people. There are two main kinds: mikoshi (
神輿), the smaller kind which are carried on the shoulders. These are basically portable shinto shrines, which gives the local gods a chance to get out and about the town. The other are dashi (山車): the size of small buildings, manned by groups bashing away at drums and cymbals. Each dashi represents an area of the city, the name of which blazes from the many lanterns adorning the dashi, and when two rival dashi meet on the street, anything could happen: from a musical stand-off, to a dance-battle, to a good old-fashioned fight.
Another unavoidable feature of these street festivals is the crowds. You can take it as a given that anything of even mild interest in Japan will be crowded, but at a festival, particularly surrounded the floats and other key features (such as the acrobatic firemen at the Kawagoe Matsuri, I kid you not), you will be locked in by a sea of people on all sides. But this is all part of the fun at a boisterous festival, and thanks to the calm and submissive nature of the Japanese, it never gets out of hand or dangerous. Unless of course you're at one of the fire festivals, where danger is what makes it.
Sadly, due to the Sendai earthquake, many festivals have cancelled for a variety of reasons, which is a shame; one of the prime functions of a festival is for people to let their hair down and open up in an otherwise a consersative, reserved society - something which is needed more than ever. But I have no doubt that festivals will continue to survive. It's only a matter of time before Japan is back on it's feet, and festivals become more unavoidable than ever.
