Up close and personal in Japan

Summer is a time for matsuri in Japan.  There are parades and festivals throughout the year, but it seems the heat of summer brings out the best festivals.  There are snow cones, called kakigori, and ice cold beer.  Children’s games and lots of delicious fair food.  During the day there are parades and at night there are fireworks. 

Wakayama has a particularly old matsuri held around the second week in May every year.  Called Wakamatsuri, this festival celebrates Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu who has a special connection to Kishu-Toshogu Shrine (it was built by one of his descendants).  The main celebration is a parade filled with many groups of people in various traditional costumes.  The parade itself is four hundred years old and many of the costumes are beyond vintage, so I was lucky to have sunny weather the day of the parade this year.

The parade itself was not huge (like Mardi Gras or Kishiwada Danjiri), but the level of participation was impressive.  There were dancers, singers, musicians, warriors, sumo wrestlers, maidens, monsters, and many more.  It was truly a spectacle.  But what struck me the most was how accessible it all was.  Parades in America always seemed like an us and them type relationship.  Even in my small South Dakota town, the annual town parade was more about performance than interacting.  Larger parades have physical barriers to separate those watching the parade and those in the parade, but even small town events seem to have a mental barricade between these two groups.

But this wasn’t the case at Wakamatsuri.  The parade made a lot of stops (carrying a god on your shoulders can be hard work) and during these the parade members talked, laughed, and took pictures with the crowd.  Granted, many of these were friends and family, Wakayama is essentially a big small town, but even the gaijin were invited into the merriment.  We were allowed to touch, photograph, and play with traditional (and probably antique) regalia.  We were plied with sake and snacks along with the rest of the participants by a local business.  The barriers, mental and physical, were removed.

I know some of the larger parades still have barriers.  This is a safety thing.  In Kishiwada groups can get those danjiri going really fast and there can be serious injuries if an unwitting spectator were to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But the emotional barrier between spectators and participants, those watching and those being watched, seems nonexistent in Japan.  Even at the bigger festivals, it seems like everyone is just there to have a good time.