If the Town Fades, the Festival Cannot Happen

When I was a child, an older neighbour used to say this to me.

"The festival lasts three days, but the three days are not the festival. All three hundred and sixty five days, the whole year, that is the festival."

Back then I loved the festival more than anything, so I took it to mean something like "if we can enjoy it all year round, so much the better." When the hayashi (festival music) started up I was in a fine mood, and once it ended I counted the days until the next year on my fingers. That is about as far as a child's head goes.

I only began to understand what the words meant once I was an adult and had been handed a little responsibility.

He had not been saying "it is fun all year round."

He had been saying "the other three hundred and sixty two days exist in order to make the three days possible."

How many people in this town think of the whole year as the festival today?

Where do the people who pull the hikiyama come from?

You can announce grandly that this is a rite for the gods, but if you do not understand what actually matters, the whole thing quietly disappears.

To hold a festival, you need people to pull the hikiyama (the festival floats).

So where do those people come from?

From the people living around the shrine, of course. Only when people live there does a place become capable of holding a rite at all. In a land where there is only a god and nobody living nearby, no festival is possible.

And those people cannot simply exist there and go on living. This is the crucial point.

Gathering people is not enough

To make a place lively, you need to bring people in. But bringing them into the neighbourhood is not enough on its own.

The people who gather, and the people who gathered them, need somewhere they can go on living. That means a living environment.

Houses to live in. Work to do. Shops to buy from. Schools and clinics too.

That environment does not appear by itself either.

Someone makes things, someone uses them, and what is left over is sold elsewhere. The money that comes back becomes the means of living.

Only on top of all that can a festival be held.

The order is the other way around

"Hold a festival and the town will come alive."

Plenty of people probably believe that. I believed it too, as a child.

But the truth runs the other way.

The festival does not enrich the town. The town is doing well, and that is why the festival is possible.

Think of a school sports day.

You can run on the day because you eat every day and move your body. Eating does not become possible because you ran.

A festival is the same. The three days are the result of what has been built up, not the tool for building it.

I suspect a fair number of people have this backwards.

The town is not lively. It is not prospering. And yet the demand is that the festival, at least, should be splendid and full of life. That is the wrong way round.

And from what I have seen, the people who say it loudest are the ones doing least, day to day, to make the town prosperous enough to carry a festival.

What lies outside the three days

So a festival is not the period of the rite.

It is the state in which the people living around that god get through their days and feel that life is good. That state itself is the festival. The three days simply rise up out of it as a result.

At the hariban (the greeting exchanged between neighbourhoods during the festival), someone announces, "We have come to bring life to your neighbourhood." As a form of words there is nothing wrong with it at all. I have heard it many times, and I have been on the side that says it.

And yet the hikiyama passes down a street of closed shutters, through a place where not a soul is in sight, for three days a year.

Can that be called bringing life to a place?

Who exactly is it being brought to?

Nine places where people gather

I am not a learned man, so let me borrow something useful.

At Chikko Koyasan Shakain, a temple of the Koyasan Shingon school, there is a saying that runs like this.

　1. People gather where people gather
　2. People gather where it is comfortable
　3. People gather where there is talk
　4. People gather where they can dream
　5. People gather where there is something good
　6. People gather where they find satisfaction
　7. People gather where there is something in it for them
　8. People gather in search of being moved
　9. People gather in search of heart

It is the sort of thing you hear once at a shopping street seminar, and honestly, when I was young I heard it and thought, "that is just pretty words."

But lay the nine out again and you find they describe a festival exactly.

　One to three are reasons to come.
　Four to six are reasons to stay a while.
　Seven to nine are reasons to come back.

And not one of the nine can be produced in three days.

Talk carries over from last year. Comfort is a matter of roads and shops and toilets. Dreams, feeling, heart: if the people who live in the place do not have them, there is nothing to hand to a visitor.

Let even one of the nine drop away and what remains is only the shape of the thing.

A thing that is only a shape looks like it is continuing, while in fact it wears away a little each year. The awkward part is that you cannot see the wear in the year it happens. You see it all at once, ten years later.

So what about Kakunodate today?

It is a tourist town, so people come. But most of them pass straight through.

They walk, they take photographs, they go home.

So how many places are there now where a visitor actually spends money? And where does that money flow once it is spent?

As far as I know, it is the souvenir shops and eating places near the paid car park by the cherry trees, and not much else.

In terms of the kyu-chonai (the old neighbourhoods of the town), that area has nothing to do with the rite.

People have said for as long as I can remember that the festival belongs to the kyu-chonai. My classmates who lived there said it to me often enough.

Then let me ask. What condition are those old neighbourhoods in now?

Calling it a street of closed shutters does not cover it. There are empty houses, empty lots, and places left standing open to the weather because nobody has been able to clear them.

That is what lines both sides of the road the hikiyama travels down.

Every year we hear that there are not enough hands to pull. Every year we hear that there are no young people.

But that is not the cause. It is the result.

Hands to pull are only born in a place where people can live, work, and keep a household going.

In old neighbourhoods in that condition, what exactly is there to bring to life for three days?

It is a hard thing to say, but what is being lifted may not be the town at all. It may be our own feelings.

Do I have the right to say this?

I stopped taking part in the festival about thirty years ago, so perhaps I have no standing to say any of this. I am aware of that myself.

And if someone asks me how the town should be made prosperous starting tomorrow, I have no clever answer. It is a poor showing after writing all of the above, but it is the truth, so I will write it down.

What I can say is that from a distance you see the outside of the three days more clearly. From inside, the three days take everything you have. That is only natural.

So I will write it as the job of someone standing outside.

Every year there are meetings about how to make the three days a success.

How many meetings are there about the other three hundred and sixty two days?

What will stand on both sides of this road

One last thing I would like to ask the young people reading this.

By the time you are grown, what would you like to see on both sides of the road the hikiyama travels down?

Shops? Houses with people living in them? Or the same empty lots as now?

I have no clever answer. But the time to think about it is something you have far more of than I do.

If you truly want the festival to continue, the work is outside the days of the festival.

If the town fades, the festival cannot happen.