Aki-Matsuri... Autumn Festival

Fall is a really awesome time in Japan. The weather cools down and it's a comfortable autumn temperature, great for doing just about anything (so sayeth the Japanese). The leaves start to change, and being in the countryside there are a whole lotta trees, so it's very scenic and beautiful.

The coolest events in the fall are the Aki-matsuri's (lit. Autum Festival). This year I had the chance to attend two very different events - one, a serene, traditional religious ceremony, and the other a raucous drunken melee.

I was invited by the Vice Principal of my school to the religious one - in addition to being the VP of my school, his weekend job is farming - his family owns a large area of land that he "cultivates." Cool, huh?

("Oh Kyoto-sensei, how was your weekend? Ah, it was no good Michael, I had to cultivate my land this weekend.")

It turns out that his cousin is the local head priest of the area and so he invited me (and Markane and Nancy, two other JETs in this area) to get the VIP experience. It was cool! The ceremony we went was meant to welcome the local god to come out of his shrine and survey the ripening rice, and give the farmers a blessing for a good crop.


Under the full moon, and we marched with a big group of farmers (wielding big huge cool lanterns) to the temple.

At the temple (we got to sit inside, right next to the actual ceremony area), the priest sang songs and recited prayers to move the "essence" of the god from the temple into a "portable shrine," which was to be carried out around the area's farms and land in the next few days.

It was a really great opportunity to witness the development of culture - that a traditionally agraian society still carries on the ritual of times past (I mean, you can buy the stuff in huge bags anytime at the store, and ironically, this year's rice crop was early so it had already been harvested before the festival). That's such an indicative example of the duality of Japan - beautifully traditional while at the same time ultra modern.

SO... a couple of days later I attended another "Aki-Matsuri" in Mitsu-cho, which is a small seaside fishing village where my friend Zainabu teaches. The festival was also at night, and it was pretty much a bunch of really wasted Japanese dudes (it seems like everyone in town had been drinking all day), wearing hapi coats (those little jackets), and thongs made of thick white rope. They were carrying huge bamboo poles and smashing the shit out of these enormous lanterns in front of the local temple. It was crazy!

(October's cover of Kansai Time out, a local English magazine. These guys are carrying a portable shrine, which is a really popular thing to do at this time of year. Man I bet the rope burn really sucks!!)

Literally called the "lantern beating festival," they would hoist a gigantic lantern up and run laps around it, and then all of a sudden they would all come together and start beating the hell out of the lantern. Some of the dudes even set fire to them, lit fireworks, and stomp them into little bits and pieces. Very different from the previous Aki-matsuri, huh?



The meaning of this festival was to scare away evil spirits, and I'm sure it worked. When I was shooting the photos that night, there was a ton of dust flying around in the air from the dudes kicking up the dirt.

Initially I had written it off as just dust, but Nikki pointed out that sometimes these random orbs pop up in pictures because they are spirits that the camera catches... cool, huh.