The People Who Come to Take the Role

The People Who Come to Take the Role

Some time ago I wrote a piece called "If the town decays, the festival cannot happen." The argument was simple. The three days are the result of what has been built up. They are not the tool for building it.

After publishing it, I noticed there was not a single concrete example in it. I said the order had been reversed, but I never showed what that reversal looks like from inside.

So this time I will give one example. It happened about thirty years ago.

A note for readers outside Japan

The Kakunodate festival is held every year from the seventh to the ninth of September, in a small former castle town in Akita Prefecture. Eighteen wooden floats, called hikiyama, are pulled through the streets. Each float belongs to a chonai, a neighbourhood ward, and is run entirely by the people who live in it. Nobody is paid. The floats have no engine and no brakes. They are pulled, turned and stopped by hand.

Two things matter for what follows.

The first is that this is a festival for a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist hall at the same time. Shinmeisha, the shrine, and the Yakushido of Joujuin, the temple hall. Both are honoured within the same three days. Before 1868 this mixing of the two religions was ordinary in Japan. Today it is rare, and here it has survived.

The second is that every float has a chief officer, chosen fresh each year by the young men of the ward. He decides where the float goes, when it moves, and what it does when it meets another float. And the central thing a float does is travel to the shrine and to the hall so that the ward can pay its respects. That journey is the job. Everything else the officer does hangs from it.

The role has content

Seven September is the eve of the shrine's festival. The eighth is the shrine's main day and the eve of the hall's. The ninth is the hall's main day.

A float is either going up or coming down. A float heading for the shrine, for the hall, or for the residence of the Satake-Kita family is called nobori-yama, an ascending float. On the way back it is kudari-yama, a descending float. The descending float gives way to the ascending one.

This is the part that matters.

What people know about this festival, if they know anything, is the collisions. Two floats meet in a narrow street, the men negotiate over who yields, the negotiation fails, and the floats are driven into each other.

But why does one side have the standing to refuse? Because it is ascending. Because it has somewhere it must be.

The worship is what gives the negotiation its terms. Both sides have a purpose, so a bargain is possible. Take the purpose away and nothing is left but winning and losing.

So the worship is not an extra attached to the three days. It is the thing that holds the shape of the three days together. The festival is designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan, and what is designated is this whole practice, not the collisions.

And the chief officer of a float is the man who takes it up. That is what the role contains.

A year I watched

The way the officer was chosen went like this. First, call for anyone who wants to stand. If nobody does, someone is nominated. If more than one stands, the young men present hold a vote.

That year, everybody knew in advance that there was a man who wanted to stand.

But he did not arrive at the appointed time. He was ruled out for being late. And with that, a new chief officer was decided.

I was there. I could not stop it. Being young is not an excuse. It is more accurate to say that the room had already settled into producing that new officer, and there was no point in resisting.

Being late is a failing. That much is true. But by disqualifying him on that ground, the room never once had to ask whether anyone was willing to do what the role contains.

And the man who was chosen did not go up to the shrine that year. During the hours of the worship, he was eating at a shop nearby.

If it had happened once, I could accept that something came up. People have reasons they cannot say out loud.

But as far as I know, he is like that every year. Not only in the year he held the role. He does not go up to the shrine. He does go up to the hall. He has always done it that way.

Something carried through every year is not laziness. It is a position.

Nor is it a matter of doctrine. There are Buddhist traditions in Japan that hold back from worshipping outside their own object of faith. But those traditions generally exclude the Shinto gods and the other Buddhas alike. They do not produce a man who refuses the shrine and accepts the medicine Buddha.

So he is not following a teaching, and he is not deciding by mood. He has some reason of his own, and he has kept to it for a long time. That is the only way to read it.

And whatever that reason is, I have nothing to say about it. Whether a man worships is his own business.

What I am still caught on is what came next.

"I'll buy you a meal, so stay and eat with me."

That is how he invited people. I was one of the people there.

What does it mean that those words can be said out loud?

Buying a meal is payment. The moment payment is offered, a price has been set on the other man's worship. The price of one meal.

Holding to your own position is your own affair. But when he extended that position to other people, what he put up for it was a single meal. That was the price on somebody else's worship.

And nobody tries to buy, at that price, a thing they consider heavy. Turn it around: the more seriously a man holds his own position, the more clearly he understands that it belongs to him alone. Understanding that, he steps aside quietly. He does not invite anyone.

Being able to invite them means, at the very least, that he has no sense of it being his own private matter. That is where I am caught.

He wanted the role. He did not want its content

So why did he want the role?

A chief officer gets things besides the worship. He gets authority over how the float moves. Yield or push when two floats meet, how long to make the other side wait, whose face to save. He holds the decisions in the moments when the ward's men are most visibly in motion. He gets standing in the ward. He commands the young men.

Strip the worship out and none of that is diminished.

So there is only one way to read it. What he wanted was the authority. The worship was a troublesome clause attached to it.

Wanting to taste that negotiation is not, in itself, something I think badly of. If nobody wanted to move that scene by his own judgement, I doubt this festival would have survived in its present form. I would guess that most young men who look up to the role are drawn by exactly that.

But looking up to a role and taking it are two different things.

A man who takes this role should be a man who understands that the important things extend past the three days. I still believe that.

And in this case the problem sits further back than that. The role is the one that takes the float up to the shrine. His own position is that he does not go up to the shrine. There is no arrangement of those two things in which they fit together. He knew they did not fit, and he went for the role anyway. What he discarded was the content of the role.

Nowhere in the choosing does anyone ask about the content

Still, there is no point in blaming him alone.

That he does not go up to the shrine is an annual fact. Anyone in the ward knew it, and had known it for years. He was not chosen in ignorance. A man known not to go up to the shrine was appointed to the role that takes the float up to the shrine. That is what happened in that room.

One man cannot take a role by himself. The disqualification carried because the room was already disposed to let it carry. I could not resist it either. And if the ward chose the same way again the following year, then the ward decided it was content with that.

Which is to say: the procedure has no point in it where anyone is asked whether he intends to do what the role contains. Standing, nomination, a vote. As a procedure there is nothing wrong with any of it. And still, what decides the outcome is the heat in the room and the strength of a push.

Under those conditions the man who wants it most wins. And the man who wants it most is usually the one who wants the standing rather than the content. Some of them only want their name known.

Blaming him changes nothing. Next year the same kind of man appears. Unless the way of choosing changes, he will keep appearing.

Why I stopped

I stopped taking part in the festival about thirty years ago. In the earlier piece I wrote that a man who quit may have no standing to say these things.

Let me add why I quit.

First, I should say that I never once wanted to be a chief officer. People around me said I was a candidate, but I had known since childhood that I am not a man who stands above others. People are suited to some things and unsuited to others. I was thoroughly unsuited.

So this is not the complaint of a man who failed to get the role.

I did not quit because it was hard, either. The collisions, the waiting, the cold. You do all of it if you believe it means something.

I quit because I came to know that the man above us did not understand the part that gives it meaning, and was not carrying it. From the moment you know that, the arrangement is that you alone are taking it seriously. Having seen it, being told to continue anyway is not possible.

I would guess a considerable number of young men have drifted away quietly for much the same reason.

The awkward thing is that this kind of leaving does not show up in any figure. Eighteen floats go out again this year. If hands are short, people are brought in from outside. From inside the ward, the festival has been held exactly as it was last year. Who stopped coming, and why, is recorded nowhere.

What shrank is not the headcount. It is the proportion of people willing to carry the meaning. That is the one thing nobody is looking at.

Who will carry the other three hundred and sixty-two days

In the earlier piece I wrote that every year there are discussions about how to make the three days lively, and asked how many discussions there are about the other three hundred and sixty-two.

This time the question is one step earlier than that.

How are we choosing the people who will carry those three hundred and sixty-two days?

I doubt ours is the only ward struggling with it.

The walking done to collect donations, the awkwardness when a house says no, the preparation of the float, the ordinary business of the ward through the year. None of it appears during the three days. None of it ends up in a photograph.

A man who comes only for the showpiece of the three days is not handed that part. It goes unhanded, and someone fills it in silence.

While that lasts, nothing looks broken from outside. On the day itself, the shape holds.

What breaks is the rest of the year, and nobody is watching there, so it is not noticed until it has broken completely. It surfaces five or ten years later, as a year when for some reason people do not turn up.

By then the man who caused it has long since stepped down. There is no one left to hold to account. And watching nothing change because there is no one to ask, more young men walk away.

What is never asked

In an earlier piece, "I Spent a Few Days Looking for What Is Good About Kakunodate," I wrote about the donations. We lowered the sum our household gave, and from one year on nobody came to collect. I will leave the details there. What that told me was that the collector had not been coming to confirm whether we were still part of the ward. He had been coming for the amount.

In the same piece I mentioned another ward, where reportedly nobody living there holds any position of responsibility, yet the donations are still demanded, and a new float is being built at the say-so of participants who come in from outside. That is hearsay and I cannot vouch for it. But I doubt it is the only ward shaped that way.

Set them side by side and they all have the same shape.

When a chief officer is chosen, nobody asks whether he intends to do what the role consists of. When donations are collected, nobody asks whether the household still wants to belong to the ward. When hands are gathered, nobody asks what that person is taking on here.

What is asked is whether there is a man for the role, whether the money comes in, whether the headcount is met. Nothing else. All of them are figures that only need to be in place by the day itself.

Match the form without asking after the substance. The three days will hold up that way.

The other three hundred and sixty-two will not.

If you genuinely want this to continue, the question is not what to do with the three days. It is how we decide who to put in charge of the other three hundred and sixty-two.