This is the last of a series of posts based on photos of Japan.
Japanese festivals are time out from the discipline and constraints of daily life. Perhaps all societies, by definition, require this. In Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton writes:
Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit…. Medieval Christianity certainly understood this.... For most of the year, it preached solemnity, order, restraint, fellowship, earnestness, a love of God and sexual decorum, and then on New Year’s Eve it opened the locks on the collective psyche and unleashed the festem fatourum, the Feast of Fools. For four days, the world was turned on its head…. None of this was considered just a joke. It was sacred… designed to ensure that all the rest of the year things would remain the right way up.
De Botton suggests "we must fully accept the depths of our destructive, antisocial feelings. We shouldn’t banish feasting and debauchery to the margins, to be mopped up by the police and frowned upon by commentators. We should give chaos pride of place once a year.”
This seems the spirit behind the festival in Japan, where pressure to conformity remains an important part of the social fabric. In any and every neighborhood throughout the land, in city and countryside alike, there is an annual religiously sanctioned, communal, noisy, alcohol- and/or adrenaline-fueled, more or less chaotic letting go.
The picture is from the summer just past. With a rice paddy in the foreground, locals carry the massively heavy portable Shinto shrine back from its annual dunking in the sea. The man beside the shrine with the blue coat with a crest on the back is banging the metal handles in rhythm. People take turns leading the chanting. The journey is a slow one, broken every fifteen minutes or so with a stop for libation provided by households along the route. If the crowd in the picture looks subdued, it would be because they’ve been at it for 18 hours, and this is the wind down from the frenzy.
--Julian
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