Why I Was Able to Quit the Omatsuri

If you live in Kakunodate, there are two events everyone comes to love, two that everyone gets swept up in.
One is the cherry blossom viewing. The other is the Omatsuri, our festival.

As a Kakunodate man, I loved them both.
But at a certain point I stopped caring about the Omatsuri. It was not that I came to hate it. I simply lost all interest.
I am nearly sixty now, and thirty years have passed since I last took part. The statute of limitations has run out, so let me set down why.

Nothing is more frightening than rumor.
That I lost a power struggle. That I ran away. That I gave up on my neighborhood. All sorts of things have been said, and not one of them is true.
What I am about to write, I have never told anyone. (Or perhaps I have, once.)

Put simply: in Kyoto I realized that Kakunodate no Omatsuri, the festival of my hometown, was the filthiest festival in Japan.

In 1994 the Zenkoku Gion Matsuri Yamakasa Junko was held to mark the 1200th anniversary of the founding of Heian-kyo, a procession that brought festival floats from all over the country together in Kyoto. Our Omatsuri took part in it.
I was born in 1969, so I was twenty five that year. That puts my last festival somewhere between twenty five and twenty seven.
It was about thirty two years ago, so even if I hung on for another two years, thirty years have gone by.
And that procession is the key to why I quit.

I was one of the men who went.
And until I went, I believed without a shred of doubt that Kakunodate no Omatsuri was the finest in Japan.

I was wrong.
The music and the dancing, yes. Those truly are the finest in Japan, and I will not concede that point even now.
But the hikiyama, the great wheeled floats, were the worst of the lot, and so was the way we pulled them. I say that as a man who was there.

I had gone up early to help build our float, so I did not see everything.
Still, while I worked, the preparations of the other towns were right there in front of me.

All I could do was watch, fascinated and astonished.
Parts lifted one by one out of carefully made storage crates, assembled piece by piece. Even the biggest, heaviest floats were handled with enormous care.
And ours? It was another neighborhood's crew doing the building, but the basic work is the same.
Yet care came second to speed. How fast can we get this thing together. There was no affection for the float in it at all.

That feeling has never left me.

Then, the eve of the procession.
Two floats from our own region merely came face to face, and a quarrel broke out.
I could not believe it. We had come all the way to Kyoto, and here they were fighting over something no outsider could even follow.
I stepped in to stop it. They paid no attention. One man was howling as though he had come to Kyoto specifically to settle old scores.
I did not want us shamed in public, so I stepped in again. This time a senior man from my own neighborhood shouted me down: leave it, stay out of it.

True enough, it was not my neighborhood's quarrel. I could have let it go.
But what was the point of coming all the way to Kyoto to show Kakunodate at its most hojine, which in the Akita dialect means a man with no sense at all?

In the end it seems to have petered out with nobody any the wiser, the way it always does.

The next day we paraded through the streets, the hikimawashi. Here too something bothered me.

We would move the float in front of a huge crowd of tourists, stop, and let the dancers perform. That part is fine.
The problem is what we were doing in the meantime: knocking back cans of beer underneath the float.

While the float stood still for the dancing, we drank beneath it. Then we moved again. Over and over.
There is no point to it.
All those tourists, looking up at a beautiful dance, then lowering their eyes to a crowd of young men pouring beer down their throats. Would anyone call that beautiful? That was the question that got into me.
Kakunodate no Omatsuri is like this. The moment the hikimawashi becomes a show for tourists, the reason for moving the float disappears, the spirit goes out of it, and it turns dull.

We had done tourist runs before, certainly. But I had never found one as dull as that.

Still carrying that feeling, we finished the yama-buttsuke, the ritual collision of two floats, staged that day for the tourists, and moved on to taking our float apart.
And there I felt wretched all over again.

The other towns began dismantling with great care. They had no intention of finishing that day. It was work that would run on into the following days.
Ours: lift out the figure on top, then rip the rest of the decorations off bare-handed.
That is normal where I come from. I had done it that way for years myself. Even so, I had never felt so hollow doing it.

What does "the finest in Japan" even mean?
That may have been the moment the finest festival in Japan became the worst one.

That must have been the trigger.
I began objecting to everything, saying it ought to be done differently, and I realized I could not keep it up.

And there is this. One wrong move and that festival could kill someone.
If I kept going, I might kill a man, or be killed myself. I started thinking that around the same time.
But you cannot say such a thing out loud, so you do not. It is only in the last ten or fifteen years that I have been able to say it at all.

Back then, plenty of people knew that empty cans and rubbish were left scattered behind the floats after the main event and after the evening runs.
There was a shocking amount of it, beer cans above all.
And the ones cleaning it up were not the float crews. They were the people who actually lived on those streets.
The reason is simple. You cannot live in filth, and it is unsanitary.
I believe it was around then that the crews started cleaning up after themselves. I had no interest in keeping track, so I have forgotten.

And the final trigger was the practice of towing a cart along behind the float.
I think that is what undid the best part of the Omatsuri.

A float with a god dwelling in it, and behind it a cart doing duty as a luggage rack. Why?
And somewhere along the way it took on the face of a custom that had always been there. I find that baffling.
Whether the cart is there or not changes how you pull and how the thing looks. They hitch it on knowing that, and the festival has gone dull because of it.
Do they see it, or not? I have no idea.

I know which neighborhood's float crew started it, but that is not the issue.

The issue is that nobody sees they hitched it on simply to make things easier for themselves. And when they do see it, nobody puts a stop to it.
It has always run on "everyone else does it, so we do it too," and that is a nasty way for a thing to run.
Say "everyone else does it, so why is it wrong when we do?" and nobody moves to fix anything. There is no discussion. It just gets handed on to next year's crew.
In the end it is the same as the kosho, the negotiation between two floats over right of way. Bluff, twisted logic, and whoever speaks first wins. I suspect that custom is simply still going.

Write something like this and someone will say: "The kosho, is it? And yet you could not get a word out at the tourist collision, could you." That is true. It is exactly right.
But that was a case of being ordered, with no warning, to do something I had never prepared for. My nature is such that nothing went into my head and nothing came out of my mouth.
Nobody imagines that a man might simply be bad at improvised negotiation.
If anything, I think they wanted to watch me squirm.

And this too. As long as I enjoyed myself during the festival and went home satisfied, that was enough for me. That way of thinking is no good either.

And yet, back when I knew none of this and took part with nothing but pure enjoyment, the Omatsuri really was wonderful.

Learning the other reality soured me on it. On top of that came the realization that it would never become the festival I wanted it to be. The scattered rubbish and the carts finished it off, and every desire to take part drained away.

Even so, it was a festival I loved, so I smouldered for a while, wandering around town grumbling about this and that.
Once my illness worsened, I stopped going out at all.
And now the interest is gone completely.

Thirty years on, there is one thing I can say. I am glad I quit.
More than that, I should have seen it sooner and found something else to enjoy. That is how little I regret it.

One last thing.
I am not writing this to reminisce, and I am not writing it to blame anyone.

If you want Kakunodate no Omatsuri to be better, then go and see the festivals of other prefectures with your own eyes, just once.
Without looking outward, you cannot know what you are missing.
I am the proof. Until I went to Kyoto, I believed without question that ours was the best in Japan.

If it gives those who enjoy the Omatsuri today a reason to stop and think, even once, then it was worth writing.