Revisiting past posts to celebrate ten years of Only A Blockhead. “Hamaorisai” (meaning “down to the beach”) is Chigasaki’s biggest annual festival, and it was this week. This post combined material from 2011, 2014 and 2017.
As everywhere in Japan, Shinto shrines protect our local countryside. “Mikoshi” portable shrines from about 40 of the currently most prosperous are carried by local residents to the sea once a year. This is the Hamaorisai festival on the July holiday called Marine Day.
For the last week, certain city streets and roads across the countryside have sported ropes decorated with white sacred papers to mark the routes, and the muffled sound of drums and flutes echoed late into the evening to advertise and build anticipation for the event.
The portable shrines are readied, and from around midnight, they are carried through the designated streets. As we sleep, their chants and drums echo into our dreams. Dozens of individuals dress up and combine their sweat and strength--in rotation, falling out to be immediately replaced--to port one of these enormously heavy mikoshi. It is both an example of and a metaphor for the neighborhood cooperation woven into the fabric of society.
The shrines converge at the beach at first light, arriving one after the other in raucous fashion. Many hundreds of people gather on the sand to witness this climax. Dozens of stalls sell food and drink. The shrines are paraded through the crowds in elated festival spirits, snaking and dipping to the rhythm of beating metal and the shouted chants of the bearers, before lining up to be blessed by the senior Shinto priest.
After the blessing, the mikoshi are taken into the sea in a purification ritual, with the teams of men and women porters daring each other deeper.
After this, the tension is released. In a more relaxed fashion, but with no less effort, the mikoshi are borne away, with frequent stops for rest and refreshments set up in the road outside the houses of prominent citizens, paid for by everyone living nearby. At these stops, the portable shrines are set on trestles, while the porters drink beer or sake before girding themselves with megaphone chants to carry their burden another few hundred yards to the next stop.
Young children join the procession, sitting in large carts playing drums, with older children playing flutes. Police stop traffic as the shrine lurches across an intersection, seemingly with an inebriated life of its own. Knots of costumed and exhausted carriers gather on the curbs. And so the mikoshi make their slow and noisy way back to their home shrines in the heat of the day.
--Julian
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