A traditional matsuri festival is rooted in the local community of farmers, fisherman and businesses. By and for local households, it involves all ages from primary school children to the retired. It is a harvest festival centered upon the Shinto shrine, and is at once indelibly ancient and entirely of the moment, a happy fusion of the sacred and profane.
Last Sunday, Koshigoe, a small fishing port opposite Enoshima Island in the Sagami Bay an hour south of Tokyo, held its summer festival. At 10AM, floats and mikoshi portable shrines were slowly paraded down the main street lined with stalls selling children's toys and stir-fried noodles. Participants wore matching summer yukata robes with bright designs. Town elders rode on the roofs of the floats or walked ahead of the shrine priest who was preceded by two youths wearing lion heads upon their own. On the floats, small children banged on drums and junior high school aged boys played flutes. Walking behind, an older boy banged a taiko drum to his own beat. This discordant, exciting sound carries through the town and says "festival!" The floats paused in front of houses where tables were set out and beer and sake, soft drinks and snacks were offered.
At the front of the parade, the oldest mikoshi being carried and bounced with vigorous shouts turned left down to the beach where it was set down on trestles. Out to sea, a half-dozen fishing boats with more drummers and festival flutes clustered around the beach, beating out music. Twenty or so brawny middle-aged men stripped down to shorts or loincloths. At 11AM, the shrine was picked up again by the men and, with shouts and percussion, slowly borne into the sea, further and further off the beach until the men were up to their necks in water. The shrine was then turned once and carried back to the beach.
Down toward Enoshima Island, canned music from beach bar loudspeakers played to the bathing families, the surfers, and the couples down from Tokyo for the day. Modern life with its shallow roots, nuclear families, individualism and goods on demand shared the beach with an ancient ritual celebrating the bonds of community and the land and the sea that sustain it.
--Julian