Sign of the Times
The Tanabu Matsuri festival -- a rough diamond
This summer, I had the opportunity to visit the Tanabu Matsuri festival in Aomori Prefecture. An annual event of the Tanabu Shrine in the city of Mutsu, it is the largest summer festival held on the Shimokita Peninsula and is designated an "intangible folklore cultural asset" by the Aomori Prefectural Government.
A distinctive characteristic of this festival is the use of "Yama" floats, closely resembling the "Yamahoko" floats seen in Kyoto's Gion Festival. As a thriving distribution base on the Kitamaebune shipping route during the Edo and Meiji periods, Tanabu enjoyed an influx of festival traditions -- with the Tanabu Festival said to be derived from the Gion Festival -- and goods from central Japan. These festivals eventually took root in local culture thanks to the wealth accumulated from shipping.
Having researched this much before my visit, I was surprised to find how few people there were in Mutsu upon my arrival. The city has a population of about 65,000, which climbs to 120,000 during the festival. I'd assumed that the city would be swarming with tourists during the festival. Instead, visitors were few and far between.
After meeting with an official from the Mutsu Municipal Government who acted as my guide, however, I gradually realized that the notion that all regional festivals are connected to efforts to boost local tourism had been a misguided assumption on my part.
I scheduled my visit to see the middle-of-the-night finale, an event I'd been advised not to miss. The entire festival spans three days, however, during which five floats from the city's various districts parade through the city and local residents follow them around. On the final night, "the parting ceremony of the five carts" takes place.
The Tanabu Festival is unlike the Nebuta Festival, where floats travel one after another past spectator box seats that have been set up for visitors. The city's festival-time population of 120,000 is the total figure for the three-day festival, which means there aren't that many tourists; most are locals. And since these locals are generally following the floats around, parts of the city where the floats happen not to be are practically deserted.
I witnessed a crowd when I came upon a float that had stopped for a "costume change" of ornaments.
Draped during the daytime in a splendid embroidered cloth made in Kyoto, in the evenings, the floats are decorated with painted lanterns that are illuminated brilliantly. The lighting has fabulous effect.
But perhaps it was my preconceived notions of festival protocol kicking in again, but I couldn't help but feel that everything was done rather sloppily at a sluggish pace.
Like the Gion Festival, the parade's big moments are the powerful corner turns made by the floats with their wooden wheels. But unlike other similar festivals, rounding corners at full speed is, as a rule, prohibited. The floats must first be brought to a stop, after which the float-pullers line up on the side of the street the float is headed in, and pull the float round the corner in a single burst of force.
At times the young float-pullers can't slow down completely and use momentum to make these turns. But they don't get carried away. At the next turn, they are seen coming to a full stop and steadily round the corner. It appears that because the festival spans three days and there are no spectators to speak of, even the younger participants are unable to maintain the same level of enthusiasm throughout the three day parades.
Even the participants' calls and cheers were uncoordinated, with the young float-pullers sometimes singing random songs in lieu of synchronized shouts. But the elders didn't seem to mind, looking on with smiles on their faces.
Though at first I was taken for a loop, I soon realized that the true value of the festival lay in its laxness.
Young men drink the sake served to them on the streets by local residents and sing half-baked songs as they pull the floats, local residents sauntering along with them. It's basically a three-day city-wide drinking party -- a mobile one centered around floats -- which I think is a great way to get the city's spirits high with drinks.
A one false step can result in serious injury in festivals where the "valiance" is valued in the high-speed maneuvering of floats or people parading, as in the Gion Yamakasa Festival in Fukuoka city, Fukuoka Prefecture, and the Kishiwada Danjiri Festival in Osaka's Kishiwada city.
Because of the danger, the floats' routes are clearly demarcated on the streets at such festivals, which also serve to draw a clear line between festival organizers and spectators. The excitement felt by onlookers are fed back to the organizers, who then pursue this highly regarded heroism even further, which in turn reinforces the barriers between float-pullers and sidewalk audience. The more radical a performance a festival is, the greater its value as a tool in attracting tourists. But one cannot help but feel that we've lost sight of such festivals' original purpose, which was the strengthening of local community ties.
"The Tanabu Festival is not very well-known, is it?" I said to the local official. "We don't advertise the festival to tourists. It's our festival," was his simple response. As it turns out, the float procession is not organized by the Tanabu Shrine itself. In fact, there is no actual "organizer"; local residents take the initiative to put on the festival themselves. It was clear how much the entire city treasured the laid-back nature of this festival.
The climax of the event, the parting ceremony of five carts, began around 11 p.m. A sake barrel was brought to the city's main intersection, where the managers of the various floats drank to each others' promises of meeting again the following year. There was a certain loneliness as the floats then retreated one by one, and the light of the lanterns and the music begin to fade. But this process, too, apparently drags on languidly, with the last float still hanging around the corner until early the next morning. No one comes to break up the party: "The exact period for which the floats have obtained permission to stay on the street is this and that."
The next day, I heard from festival participants that they'd continued drinking and lugging the floats around the city long after I'd left. Definitely, there were no hands on the backstage scheduling or manipulating events with clearly-defined deadlines.
Now that the era of high-speed growth with no ceiling has come to a definitive end in Japan, what is being sought is a strong sense of community, and sustainability. The Tanabu Festival's intentional devotion to laxness seemed to address this very need, and moved me in a strange manner.
(Mainichi Japan) October 9, 2009