I Spent a Few Days Thinking About What Is Good in Kakunodate

I added a new section for Kakunodate to my site. Having added it, I had to write something for it, so I decided to start with an article about the good things here. If I am going to criticize a place, I thought, I should do it knowing what is good about it first.

I thought about it for a few days. Nothing came.

Wondering whether my own head had simply gone stiff, I asked an AI: do you understand that there are good things about Kakunodate? What came back was the town plan of 1620, still almost intact; the cherry trees along the Hinokinai River embankment and the weeping cherries in the samurai district; and kabazaiku, the local cherry-bark craft. None of it is wrong. All of it really is here.

But something struck me as I read. Everything on the list was something a visitor consumes. Whether life is good for the people who live here is a different question. What I had spent days failing to find was, I think, on that other side.

Looking back, this is nothing new. When I was in elementary school my dream was to fish for king salmon and build log houses in Canada. I had taken Takao Yaguchi's manga "Tsurikichi Sanpei" entirely to heart. But Sanpei is set in Akita, and I really did go down to the Hinokinai River with a rod in my hands. I was fishing in the same river, and still the place I pictured was Canada. Long before I fell ill, I already wanted to live in another prefecture.

So do I dislike Kakunodate? Or did I simply not want to be here? I went a long time without settling that, and I have not settled it now. What I do think is that what I disliked back then was not the place itself, but the sense that as long as I stayed here my own story would go no further. Log houses and king salmon were not hidden somewhere behind Kakunodate. They were things that had no continuation here.

And now I have settled in Kakunodate.

The people who put into words what is hard about living here were not, as it happens, locals. People who had moved in from other prefectures and other chonai - the town blocks that also serve as the festival's working units - all said the same thing: it is difficult to get along with people here. I had felt it too. The obligations of the chonai that come with the Kakunodate Festival, the friction with the house next door - in this town those things were ordinary.

This is the important part. People who came from outside said the same thing I felt, independently of me. Which means this is not a matter of anyone's personality, and not a matter of a bad fit. It comes out of the structure of the town.

A chonai in Kakunodate carries two meanings at once. It is the block you live in, and it is also the organization that puts a hikiyama, a festival float, on the street. When those two overlap, the option of stepping back from your neighbors disappears. In a city, if you fall out with the house next door, you keep your distance and that is the end of it. Here you will be preparing with that neighbor from August and pulling the float alongside him in September. And in the Kakunodate Festival, chonai colliding with chonai is built into the event itself. Inside, you are required to hold together; outside, you compete. As a design for human relations, the pressure it generates is considerable.

So the cherry blossoms, the samurai houses and the kabazaiku do not make up for it. The weight of getting along falls on you every day. The blossoms last two or three weeks. It does not balance.

Even so, there are people who settle here. I used to assume they were people who enjoy dealing with others, or who are good at it. But looking closely, the ones who settle are precisely the ones whose position on the Kakunodate Festival is clear-cut. Either they run a business facing customers and show no interest at all, or they go the other way. There is nobody in the middle.

Why is there no middle? Because the middle costs the most. A chonai has no category for a light member. Deal with it halfway and every obligation of the inside falls on you, while the treatment reserved for outsiders never lifts. Your outlay grows and you gain no standing. It is cheaper either to do all of it or to declare from the start that you will have nothing to do with it. Left to themselves, people swing to one end or the other.

That also shows the order in which the old chonai lose their residents. The ones who disappear, I suspect, are the ones who could not swing to either end. The more a person values getting along, the harder they try to stay in the middle, and the more they are worn down.

True or not, I have heard this as well. In one chonai nobody living there holds any position of responsibility in the festival, and yet donations are still collected from them, and when the participants who come in from outside say a new hikiyama should be built, the residents go along with whatever they are told. I have heard of one such case, and I imagine there are others shaped like it.

If the people who live there are not really taking part, then giving it up altogether ought to be worth considering. That is what I think, at least. But those words never actually get said.

And it is a mistake to explain that silence by saying the people involved lack nerve.

The side that puts the float on the street and the side that covers the cost have become different people. Those who carry the burden have no say, and those who decide carry nothing. An organization shaped like that will always break the burden-carrying side first, if left alone. When somebody says it has become a nuisance, that is not a complaint. It is a report of fact.

I have gone around collecting the donations myself. More than a few houses turned me away. We no longer have room in the budget. We have decided not to take part. There is nobody left in this house who takes part. The wording differs, but they arrive at the same place. The houses that have become pure payers drop away, one after another.

My own house paid as well. Ten thousand yen in donations, and for the yaya round through the chonai, two sho of sake and an offering of three to five thousand yen. Even after I stopped taking part in the festival I kept paying the ten thousand for a while, then lowered it to five thousand, then to three. The following year, nobody came to collect at all.

At ten thousand yen they came every year; at three thousand they did not. If that is so, then it was never a question of whether I belonged to the chonai. It was a question of the amount.

So why can nobody say it should stop? Because the cost of stopping falls on one individual, all at once, in full. The cost of continuing is spread thinly across everyone in the chonai, a little every year, but the cost of the moment somebody says stop lands on the one who said it. And in Kakunodate, everyone will remember for the rest of their lives exactly who said it. You cannot move away and escape it either. As long as that asymmetry holds, nobody speaks, even if every single person is privately against it. Staying quiet is the rational move.

Having come this far, something occurs to me.

Probably every one of them believes they are the only one who thinks this way. In truth nobody wants to continue, but each person misreads everyone else as wanting to, and so the event survives with zero actual supporters. This is not a rare phenomenon; apparently it happens in groups fairly often.

The old ways should be kept up - that is a thing often said in this town. But the number of people who genuinely believe it may be far smaller than the volume of the voices suggests. Since nobody raises it, nobody has ever checked.

If I have a proposal, it is that what is needed is not for somebody to find courage. It is for somebody to count. Hand a slip of paper to every household in the chonai and have them write anonymously. That alone removes the problem of being the one who spoke first. Whether anyone would be allowed to do it is another matter, and that is the real wall, but the key to unlocking a situation where nobody can speak lies in procedure, not in courage.

And yet, having written that, I caught on it myself. I do not want an event that has run for centuries to be swung one way or the other by a pile of collected slips. This is a rite for the worship of the gods. It would be discourteous to Shinmeisha and to the Yakushido, and toward something that has put down roots in this ground it would be nothing but disrespect.

So if anything is to be counted, it is not whether the event lives or dies. It is the burden. The offering itself is a sacred matter, but how often a hikiyama is rebuilt, who pays how much, whether a chonai with no participating residents keeps paying money and nothing else - those are arrangements made on the human side. The gods did not set the allocation of donations. That we have never once said any of it out loud is what is thinning the town now.

In the end, I could not write the article about what is good in Kakunodate.

That I could not write it is itself information about this town, I think. What is good is not something you find by searching. It is something that enters your eyes on its own. If days of thinking produced nothing, that only means that nothing is entering my eyes at present.

If there is anything, it is on the side of old memories. There is a bookshop that has been delivering to my house for more than fifty years. In a town with more people, that kind of relationship does not form. It comes out of the same structure as the density of contact that makes this place feel airless. Two sides of one coin, I think.

Because the density is high, things continue. That the Kakunodate Festival has run for nearly four hundred years is probably the same thing. People cannot get out, so it continues.

But that is not an argument for putting up with it. That something has continued does not guarantee anything about the lives of the people living inside it. If those who move here leave again carrying the same impression, that ought to be the single most important piece of information this town could hear. It is probably also the piece it hears least.