There is no shortage of interesting things to do in Japan even after staying here for two months, and I’ve found myself completely immersed in all different kinds of cultural festivals and interactions. Along with this, the weather has started to change from scorching hot humidity to freezing wetness, and it’s brought with it a changing of the leaves’ coloration. Being someone who has lived in Florida my whole life, I’ve never really seen the changing of the seasons and it’s been absolutely fascinating to me. People seem confused every time I stop to take pictures of a regular red tree, but to me it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.
Beyond the seasons and the weather, however, I do have some interesting festival experiences that I would like to share. The first one happened earlier in October when I went to my friend’s hometown to see a danjiri festival. Danjiri are like portable shrines in the form of beautifully decorated carts. They’re pulled by large groups of people, while others stand on the top or at the sides and play music inside of them. They’re absolutely beautifully, especially when they’re covered with lanterns at night and brought through the lantern-lit streets.
At this festival, two men saw me and were excited because I was a foreigner. They pulled me over to the cart and took pictures with me in front of it and excitedly tried to speak English. I was absolutely elated and felt touched that they took such interest in me, but this was minor compared to the next festival that I attended.
The next weekend, I went to another danjiri festival. My class had gone on Saturday, but I was busy and couldn’t make it so I went alone on Sunday. I happened to see one cart going through the streets so I followed it. It was a different atmosphere because it was nighttime on smaller streets going through a neighborhood, and there weren’t crowds of people watching the procession from the sidelines. I wound up being shepherded into a little park area with the rest of the workers while they were on break, so a man came up to me and offered me a can of juice. He noticed that I was taking pictures of the danjiri, so he too pulled me up to the cart and let me take pictures with it.
However, that wasn’t where he stopped. I returned to the park area and kept looking at the cart, and I was about to move on to look for the next cart when he told me that he wanted me to pull it. I was stunned at first and tried to refuse because I wasn’t sure if such a thing was allowed, but he insisted and brought me over to the ropes with the schoolgirls that were pulling it. One gave me a glow-in-the-dark bracelet and we tried to speak to each other as best we could with our language barrier. I pulled the cart and was amazed as they chanted and danced. Because the cart was pulled primarily by children, they also sang part of the song “Pen Pineapple Apple Pen” before launching into their chants.
I pulled the cart all night and people seemed fascinated. They greeted me and talked about me, and one man even came over to me and gave me a traditional happi. They let me borrow that one, but later they gave me a new one as a gift to take home. When we arrived at the shrine, I was also given two bags full of Japanese snacks and later I was given some mochi that was being thrown off of the cart.
At the end of the night, everyone pulled the danjiri out to the streets. There were multiple danjiri from different shrines, and they moved the carts and ran them at each other like they were fighting on the streets. Everyone ran after their cart while chanting and dancing. A man on top of the cart danced and jumped around all night, and inside the cart there were people playing instruments.
The goal of the danjiri festival (as explained to me by my professor) is to show the town to the god (kami) that’s inside the cart. People would give an offering to the shrine and receive a blessing in return. I was also given a blessing by the man that had me pull the danjiri, simply out of the kindness of his heart. I exchanged information with him and his daughter, who was my age.
The Saturday before this event was more relaxed. I went to experience zen with a small group of other students, led by two Japanese students. We tried the art of zazen, which is a style of sitting for meditation in which you sit with perfect posture with your hands resting in front of you, while keeping your eyes almost closed and trying to completely clear your mind. Your legs should also be folded into a sort of criss-cross position in front of you. We only did it for 15 minutes, but it hurt so badly that I couldn’t imagine doing it for hours like monks do. They would do it until their incense had completely burned out. They would also wake up at early hours to tend to the land and then meditate, surviving off of very little sleep in order to achieve enlightenment. The man teaching this to us also explained that because of this, monks in training would be tired and might fall asleep while practicing zazen. If they did so, their instructor would “encourage” them by hitting them with a stick. He demonstrated it on one of us. The student would hold his hands out in front of him like in prayer if he needed encouragement, and the instructor would come to him with the stick. They would bow and the student would cross his arms in front of his chest, bow again, and be hit on the shoulders/back. Then he would straighten up, bow, and return to his posture. I was almost tempted to do it just because the posture hurt so badly and I needed a break, but I didn’t.
Afterwards, we were able to look at the zen garden. There was an interesting question posed to monks to help them consider enlightenment: If you have a container too small for a koi fish, how will you catch it? To answer it, this particular temple created a garden and put some koi fish into the pond so that they would have them. He also explained that the gardens here do not change color in the seasons, and that the stones were white in order to reflect light into the temple. After we explored the gardens and the large area filled with temples, we ate curry udon at a famous place in Kyoto and then returned home.
Another interesting experience that I had occurred with pop culture. There is something called Takarazuka, which is essentially an all-female theater troupe that was developed to give people a reason to go to the area Takarazuka. Interestingly enough, the fanbase is almost entirely composed of women who form (sometimes official) fangroups for specific actresses. Usually the “male” (a woman who plays male character) top star is the most popular. These women wait in line for hours to give presents and love letters to this woman, and even sometimes just to hear her say “thank you”. It was certainly an amazing experience to be able to see it, although I wasn’t a big enough fan to wait for hours to give someone a present.
Lastly, I went to Sendai over the weekend to cheer for the Kansai Gaidai women’s relay team and it was completely paid for by the university. We took the shinkansen (bullet train) and I was amazed by how fast it went. Sendai was ridiculously cold so most of my conversation with the Japanese cheerleading team consisted of “it’s cold, it’s too cold!” I tried the three famous foods of Sendai because there wasn’t much sight-seeing that we could do in the short amount of free time that we had. I ate gyuutan (cow tongue) curry (and cow tail soup), sakana kamaboko (boiled fish paste cake), and zunda (green soybean) in a chocolate. I was hesitant to eat the cow tongue, but it didn’t really taste or feel much different from fatty beef. It was also beautiful in Sendai, with its multi-colored trees that sometimes went green, then yellow, then red.
Aside from these major events, I also got to experience a bit of Halloween in Japan. Children don’t usually get candy (although I gave them candy as a part of a celebration that Kansai Gaidai did), and Japanese people just typically wear costumes. At the school festival, some people were cross-dressing for a competition as well. As I walked home on Halloween night, a few girls rode past me on their bike and I heard one say “Happy Halloween!” so I responded with the same. The girls whispered to each other in shock, and then I heard several “Happy Halloween!”s that I responded to with a laugh.
Beyond all of that, I’m also starting to notice that my language ability is improving. When I first came here, it was hard to understand anything. Now I can separate where words end and begin, and sometimes I can understand a good amount of what people are saying. I recognize a lot more kanji and I can read things better. I’m still nervous to talk to people in Japanese, but I’m starting to do it more often. It’s been a learning experience along with a fun trip, and I’m going to keep working hard and exploring to understand more about this culture.
