Pushed Around

You're in a small American farming town at night, cruising down the main drag, when all of a sudden you have to pull over. The locals appear to be rioting! They're partying in a wild abandon, completely shattering all your stereotypes about staid country folk, and what's more, they are dragging you and a bunch of other onlookers into the whole craze!

If you add hordes of tourists and switch pagan influences for nominally Christian ones, you can start to appreciate the harvest-shindig-meets-Mardi-Gras events the Japanese simply call "festivals." This one in Chichibu was only a convenient 1.75 hours from my Tokyo suburb and of the "float" type. And said floats aren't by any means the Rose Parade or slopped-together high school Homecoming carts but vehicles with decades or even centuries of history behind their ornate, gilded front.

The pictures didn't turn out too well, but here's kind of what it looked like: crowded streets with teams of headscarved youth pulling the gigantic vessels along with ropes (OK, only those right next to the floats were actually exerting much effort).







Each float was unique, but all had lanterns and riders perched on them at various points.





The whole spectacle was obviously exciting, but another key reason for coming was for the carnival-esque atmosphere, highlighted by seemingly endless rows of food stalls. This man here is preparing "octopus bake," dough balls with a small chunk of tentacle at the center and topped with generous helpings of parsley & Worchestershire-like sauce. Very tasty! Note also the cute little mollusk on his sign; adorable logos are prevalent over here to the point of market exhaustion--and by that I mean to say that even train safety alerts sometimes employ the Hello Kitty character!

Anyways, it was a good time for all because no one got lost and the mountain air wasn't as cold as expected (an unexpected benefit of global warming--though it doesn't justify this phenomenon). Guess even this notoriously hardworking culture needs some officially sanctioned party time.