April 4

Today I woke up at the time I usually would to go to school (but it’s Saturday!). I made the 1.5 hour trip to inuyama to go to the inuyama matsuri. As the weather report showed, it did rain, but I was still able to enjoy most of the festival.

In the morning, the huge, three-story cart-floats were pulled and pushed up the old-town streets (by adults and children alike). The children on the first floor of the floats played drums and flutes as they went. Being wooden carts with no modern aspects, the axles do not turn, so when the floats need to turn, everyone has to push on an angle and the cart makes worrisome scraping sounds. It was really impressive though to see. The thing about Japan is, they put a lot of the safety precautions on the people involved. In the US, the streets would be roped off to separate the onlookers from the carts, but in Japan, you can walk past/around the carts without any problem. If you get run over, well, you’re not too bright. Maybe the keisatsu will save you before you make a dumb move, but really, if you don’t do anything irrational, it’s just another thing not to bump into.

When all the floats (there’s one for each mountain town, I saw about 13 in all) get to the front of the shrine (which is in front of Inuyamajo), they stop and one-by-one have performances. The carts are three stories tall and the performance occurs on the third floor. The first is for the musicians, the second is for the puppeteers, and so, the third is for the puppets. The performance is very old (traditional) and you can tell by the music which plays throughout the performance and consists of seemingly disconnected drumming and flute-playing. The puppets too seem to have a historic quality since the faces of the dolls eerily don’t change as they mechanically (and usually slowly) move. However, the performance is really impressive because the mechanics of the puppets are complex. The puppets don’t hang from strings, rather, they are supported from the bottom, but at many points, the support changes! For example, one puppet walked up stairs that were disconnected pillars, then hung by its hands from a scroll (with nothing hanging from or supporting its feet). Some of the puppets would bow, then turn into three-dimensional (convincing) castles. One began by walking in a circle, then stood on its head and played a drum. It was all a bit eerie, but intriguing at the same time.

I must admit though, Japanese people seem surprised by everything. After watching many of the performances, the pace seems much too slow, but each time something unexpected happened, the entire crowd sounded surprised.

Being a matsuri, there were, of course, lots of booths selling food and holding games. I really wanted to go to the booths where you try to catch gold fish using a paper disk (especially since I saw a little kid in the midst of playing with at least 10 goldfish he had caught in a miso bowl), but I couldn’t bring them back to okaasan (or the US) so I was really disappointed. I wish they had that game in the US, but being the US, it would probably be rigged to be impossible to win. As for food, I tried a chocolate-covered banana, manjuu, a french corn dog, and a nikuman. None were that impressive, but they were all worth a try. I found it really strange that they were selling plain cucumbers on a stick and even more strange that people bought them. Of course, in true Japanese style, many people bought the over-priced fair food in multiples (probably to take home). I’m still surprised at the price Japanese people will pay for crepés.


Around noon (about half of the way through the performances) it began to rain, eventually becoming too heavy to continue, so the performances were stopped. It was, ironically, around this time that Keily showed up (after debating whether to come). Later, I met up with a few other friends and walked around the castle, food stalls, and town, trying to find things to do until 7:30 when the lanterns were supposed to be lit. At one point, we were approached by a middle-aged Japanese man who spoke English and wanted to take our picture. It was all really strange (at least for me) because if anything, I would think it would be the foreigner asking the Japanese person for a photograph. He was with a couple of friends (one guy and one lady who seemed nice and a bit embarrassed by his behavior) and he introduced himself as a fly fisher studying French. Weird... As the day went on, not much else happened and we couldn’t find an information desk. Unfortunately, it got so cold and rainy that we decided to go home early anyway since we had lost our determination (and weren’t even sure if the lanterns would still be lit given the weather).

It was a bit hectic trying to find the train home, but we eventually made it. I almost missed my stop though because I was falling asleep. I got home and I was a bit worried by what I found. Most of the lights were off and okaasan’s slippers were in the hall. That was fine, but when I went to the kitchen to call okaasan’s cellphone and see what to do about dinner, her phone rang inside her purse at the kitchen table. I thought it was weird that she had left without it, so I went outside to find her, but she wasn’t there either. I decided there wasn’t much I could do about it, and that if it became too late, I would call otousan and ask what to do.

As it turned out, okaasan was at the neighborhood meeting and when she got back, I had eaten. However, the original plan was for me to eat with my friends and I couldn’t call home on the hour and a half train ride home (Japanese rule), so she hadn’t prepared for me, and she was a bit flustered. It all ended with be being given a piece of chicken despite telling okaasan I was good with the rice and miso.